Stone and metal works of art
19 Sep 2018
Richard Harrison is self-described "hardscaper"
By Amanda Miller A guy in flip-flops and board shorts is looking for a pump. He wants to hook up the fountain-and-fireplace combo in his Louisville backyard to show this reporter. He’s lived and worked here for 25 years. It’s part of how he’s grown as an artist. “I just started tinkering with this house, and I’ve been tinkering with it ever since,” says Richard Harrison, the self-described “hardscaper” who started a stonemasonry business and has made Boulder County backyards his showroom. Harrison was interning in architecture when he felt like he was being “pigeonholed” as a draftsman. He realized the cubicle life was not for him. He went to work for a stonemason—“I absolutely fell in love with a hammer and a chisel in that moment”—and he’s turned blank-canvas backyards into works of art ever since, putting in waterfalls and fire features, plus his first love—stone walls. “There’s something magic to a man about building a stone wall,” he says. Having ridden the wave of backyard water features about 15 years ago, the lifelong surfer is philosophical about it. “If you’re going to have a waterfall,” he says, “you’ve got to light it.” And it must have a drain. “It’s got an anatomy—it’s like a body.” We navigate an artist-dad’s bygone fragments—a rusted-out dune buggy toy, a grounded quadcopter, a lot of suns made from saw blades—and load up for a tour of some of Harrison’s work.
