Artist Cecily Auvil Harness brings the light touch of a watercolor expressionist to her dazzling creations in oil. Her paintings – landscapes, historical, portraits, still lifes, moments out of time – are wordless love songs, rhapsodies of color and form, light and shadow, stillness and motion. Distillations of reality filtered through the perceptions and deep feelings of a genuine romantic.

Cecily grew up in Baltimore and northern Ohio, then earned her BA at the highly regarded University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Trained as an Interior Designer, she spent four years with Jack Rouse Associates, called by the Wall Street Journal “one of the world’s leading design firms”. Cecily’s passion for painting took hold during studies in Vienna. Subsequent travels in Europe, the American Southwest, the Caribbean and the South Pacific helped to further shape her development as an artist.

Successful exhibitions in Brussels, Belgium and Cincinnati, USA did not deter Cecily from deemphasizing her career as a fine artist for a time in order to marry and raise a child. Then in 2022, Cecily moved with her family to Taos, New Mexico, like so many artists before her, drawn by the monumental landscape, the quicksilver sky, the cultural and ethnic diversity, above all, the area’s profound reverence for the arts. Since the move, she has rededicated herself to her art, attending intensive figure drawing classes, participating with the Taos Plein Air Painters, accepting commissions that challenge and broaden her and, along the way, winning the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Millicent Rogers Museum Miniatures Show. Most recently, she has concentrated on showcasing Taos Pueblo, its residents and traditions.

Of particular inspiration to Cecily has been the instruction and support of world-renowned Taos artists David Leffel and Sherrie McGraw. Arguably the foremost contemporary practitioners and professors of Abstract Realism (the conceptual approach pioneered by Titian and Rembrandt), Sherrie and David have generously shared their technical and creative insights with Cecily.

Family member, friend, gardener, chef, Cecily brings evergreen energy and an instinctual passion for perfection to everything she does. You can see it in her incredibly intricate Pysanky eggs, her ceramics, most of all, in the stories she tells with brush and pigment – the stories of your life.