Those of us who find ourselves linked, as if by an umbilical cord, to Surrealism can take comfort from the endless capacity of the world -in the antics of its dominant creature- to replenish the surrealist imagination. As man goes on his way, inventing and destroying, aspiring and collapsing, he leaves behind him a trail littered with the potential seeds of fresh poetic sparks. From a handful of such seeds arose the kernels of the Vehicles Series such as: the 20th century aspiration to a science fiction future, the 21st century knowledge of the death of this future, the current erosion of the Enlightenment and the unprecedented moral schizophrenia of 21st century man, a man of good character reliant on the spilling of innocent blood and toxic effluent, haunted by the chiding ghosts of his own cautionary myths.

Harvey studied at Stafford College of Further Education (1985-1986) and Wimbledon School of Art (1986-1989), winning the Fielders Prize at Wimbledon for best degree show. In 1989 he was a finalist of the Winsor and Newton Young Painters Award Scheme and exhibited at the Mall Galleries, London. In the 1990s he participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York.[3] The Expressionist-inspired Apollo Series dates from this time, and is the first appearance of the theme of the death of the future in the artist’s work.[4] Toward the end of the decade Harvey completed the Michelangelo Series, adapting for his own purposes the pictorial vocabulary of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment.[