A life as colourful as his canvas
From winning numerous gold medals at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in Britain in the 90s, to picking up painting once again after returning home, tells that “one thing has simply led to another”
By the tender age of five, Mike Harridge was already an avid horticulturalist. He remembers his mother’s garden in their home in Havelock Town being crowded with fruit trees – jak, mango, guava and custard apple. For a little boy interested in the natural world, it was a paradise and he grew up on friendly terms with the lizards, frogs and tortoises that scurried, leapt and crawled across their land.
He shared this love of animals with his brothers but unlike them he wasn’t very athletic – a case of childhood polio had affected his legs but not his happy temperament.By the time he was four, he was growing spring onions and spinach for their dining table, all the while dreaming of becoming a trapeze artist. What he would actually become was a welder, then an extractor of snake venom, then a keeper of tropical fish...all before he moved to England as a young man and launched into another series of careers. When Mike says he has “meandered” through life, he is not exaggerating.
Enrolled at St. Peter’s College in Colombo, Mike was also an artist from a young age. It would remain the one passion that transcended his shifting interests. (Despite the fact that as an adult he would sell out his debut exhibition, as a child he never won first place. Second prize was never as good as first – a box of paints vs. tube paints.) Having returned home after many years in England, Mike is preparing to stage his first exhibition in Sri Lanka at the Barefoot Gallery. It will be his largest solo effort so far, with 60 paintings drawn from across a decade of work on display. It’s a very varied collection, ranging from landscapes and abstracts to macro-paintings of flowers and viruses. His pieces have in common though the use of brilliant colours and very intricate detailing.
Tall, with a halo of windblown