Colin Harrison was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1939. He studied at Leicester College of Art from 1957 to 1961 and the Royal College of Art from 1961 and 1964. From 1964 to 1973 he was a lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the Ulster College of Art and Design. He died in Lincolnshire, England in 2017 following a short illness.
His work, with its ambiguous, enigmatic detail and consummately skilled draughtsmanship, constantly plays with the viewer's preconceptions of a unified pictorial space/time/narrative. His paintings and drawings typically conflate references from disparate sources in spaces fractured by mathematical grids and overlapping perspectives. This lends them a multiplicity of spatial, symbolic and metaphorical viewpoints that are simultaneously humorous and unsettling.
Colin Harrison held his first one-person exhibition in Ireland at the Dawson Gallery in 1974 and despite returning to live in England in the mid-70s he continued to show his work regularly in solo and group exhibitions at Taylor Galleries.
He was awarded the David Murrary Scholarship by the Royal Academy Schools in 1961 and he was a prizewinner at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1969. He exhibited consistently in the RHA Annual Exhibition in Dublin and took part in several Irish Exhibition of Living Art shows. His work is included in the public collections of the Arts Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Ulster Museum, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Bank of Ireland, and in private collections across Ireland, Great Britain and America.