Michael Harvey’s art has been exhibited at such renowned venues as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

His illustrations have been in the Wall Street Journal, and he was the art consultant to the New Oxford American Dictionary, providing definitions of art-related terms.

Recent paintings by Harvey are featured in a new exhibition, this one on view at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London.

“Stains Remain: Works by Michael Harvey” boasts epic canvases painted with striking colors, vivid imagination and an often cheeky sense of humor.

In “Self in Paint,” you can just make out shadows of a face under dots and drips of multiple hues of paint.

In “Starling Murmuration 1,” Harvey captures the tornadic whirlwind of the migrating starlings that fly in, gather and then settle in for the night on the Connecticut River each fall.

A series of “Women in Wind” pieces are abstract portraits of females with hair flying and swirling, sometimes hiding their faces.

The exhibition text notes that the paintings “contain personal elements — from conceptual and literary interests to contemplative values and the whimsical and humorous.”

Harvey, who grew up in England and now lives in Lyme, wrote a book, “Stains Remain: Stories of becoming an artist in the 1960s,” whose publication coincides with the Lyman Allyn exhibition. The book is sold at the museum gift shop and is available on Amazon Kindle.

In a recent interview with The Day, Harvey, 76, spoke about his art and his life.

How Harvey chose works for this exhibition:

“With difficulty. I have a great deal of art. I’ve been making art for many years, and I have a lot of it. I asked friends, and I must admit I looked at Instagram, too, and looked at what people liked the best. Because as a creator, you tend to have your favorites and your babies, and they may not be what other people like or think is any good. So I wanted a more open opinion. It’s kind of like the Beatles putting out a song they think is great, but in fact the B side does much better.”

On what he hopes people will get out of the “Stains Remain” exhibition:

“I can hope, but I don’t know whether they will or not — what I hope is that my view of life is much more of the examined life. I find the pace of life, the fast food, the fast entertainment, the fast sex, the fast everything — it sort of leaves people missing things. I feel there’s a great richness to life which is being ignored. What I’d like people to do is to linger and savor and notice and comment, and (realize) that life is very rich and that we are doing ourselves no favor at all by rushing past it.”

He used Matisse’s painting “The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room)” as inspiration for one of the pieces in the Lyman Allyn show:

“Years ago, God, I guess it’s about 15, even more, years ago ... I was in a mood of being very dissatisfied with a bunch of work I had done. I was going to paint it out, so I started painting over it — scribbling kind of painting, just taking a brush and swishing over — and stopped myself and looked at it and thought that’s more interesting than the original painting was. Because the additional scribble on top ... had changed it, had made it something different. Then I was thinking about art history and what would that do to art history, so I took (John Singer) Sargent’s ‘Madame X,’ and I scribbled all over her, and it made a completely new painting out of it.

“I always loved Matisse’s ‘Red Room,’ so I made a copy of it and then took the main color — the red — and scribbled all over it in red. I’m obviously not thinking that it’s a better painting than his is, but it’s a different painting; it becomes another painting. You can see his painting through what I did on top, and any number of artists have taken things from art history and done things to them. I wouldn’t say it’s a way to test yourself, but it’s a way of engaging art history and what has gone before and how you fit in it.”

How he got into art:

“My dad was sort of a weekend painter, so I obviously — every child wants to be like dad — so I’d watch him paint. All of us, all my sisters were very good — they would win prizes at school for art. So it seemed, since I wasn’t going to be the next nuclear physicist, that art school was probably the best choice ...

“I suppose had I been able to carry a tune, I would have become a member of a rock band, but I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t play anything. But that was the time, that was when John Lennon was in art school, when Keith Richards was in art school in England. But I just didn’t have that (musical) talent.

“Then I saw an exhibition in London by (Robert) Rauschenberg, one of his very early exhibitions, and it blew my mind. I just couldn’t believe you could be this open and this inclusive and you could embrace life like this. It was just wonderful. So I went back to my art school and started making art that the teachers wanted to throw out ... It was not what traditional art school was about, drawing figures and still-lifes and landscapes. I was doing all sorts of kooky things, imitating Rauschenberg and stuff.”

Harvey actually met Rauschenberg later:

“I was very, very fortunate to meet a lot of really significant very good artists as a young man. Rauschenberg was one of them. He was a delightful person, just unbelievably open and encouraging and embracing and funny.”

Harvey moved to New York City in 1969 when he was in his early 20s, taking a teaching job at The School of Visual Arts:

“England at that time, even though it was 20 years after World War II, was still struggling. There were only one or two galleries in London and, like everything else in England, it was class-orientated. I was from the working class, so I wasn’t going to be a hero in these very elegant places. We would read about and see in the magazines (that) everything was happening in New York. I mean, in London, it was happening if you were a musician, but if you were a visual artist, it was happening in New York.”

In 1996, he moved to Lyme:

“After 30 years in New York, I lost the lease on a very beautiful loft overlooking the Hudson River, and I had married a girl from Lyme (Georgiana Goodwin), and we decided to come up here and get our affairs in order and then go back to New York. But we got here, and she and my daughter (Sophia) loved it in Lyme so we just stayed.”

The theme for the “Stains Remain” exhibition, he says, is himself:

“What I try for in all of these pictures and it’s not even trying for, it comes naturally, is that I feel that life is there, out there, and then there is my reaction to life, and that’s what the art is. Art is basically our reaction to life ... So the paintings are a metaphor for this kind of a veil that exists between everyone and life, and that veil is you. It’s your DNA, it’s your upbringing, it’s your education, it’s your attitude, it’s all of those things — it’s you. So when you look at the tree is different from when I look at the tree. So what all of these pictures have is that veil, which is me, which is the way I am seeing things and how I feel about things.”

The hardest aspect of creative work is this:

“The thing about any creative work is it’s not that hard to be creative. What is hard is — and this is what Dr. Frankenstein discovered — the hard thing is bringing your creation to life. Unfortunately, far too much art of every kind — whether it’s music or whatever it is — is dead. It’s dull, it doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t evoke. So that’s the really hard part — is bringing whatever you do to life.”

If you go

What: “Stains Remain: Works by Michael Harvey”

Where: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St., New London

When: Through Nov. 1; hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun.

Admission: $12 adults, $9 seniors, $5 students, $7 active military personnel, and free for kids, members, and New London residents

Call: (860) 443-2545, www.lymanallyn.org