His take on Persian painting

The Boston artist was given the opportunity after Woodman Taylor, former assistant curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, invited him to create a series of his own works on paper in response to several pieces in the MFA’s collection. The show, “Glorious Beasts in Persian Painting,’’ takes animals as its theme.

Although “Glorious Beasts’’ is the fourth in a series of Islamic art exhibits at the MFA to include like-minded work by a contemporary artist, it’s the first in which that artist has been invited to make art directly inspired by the museum’s collection. Now “Garden of Truth’’ hangs beside Harris’s response to it, “Spring Blossoms.’’

“That clear blue, in the Indian experience, is the sky,’’ says Harris, standing in front of “Garden of Truth.’’ He is a collector as well as an artist, and he specializes in 16th- to 18th-century Indian drawings. He’s used to examining old folios and has taken off on works in his own collection before. In 2007, the artist had an exhibition of his Indian-inspired paintings and drawings at Victoria Munroe Fine Art.

Ask just about anyone to riff on “Garden of Truth,’’ and most would focus on the man on the elephant. That’s where the story is. But Harris, a silver-haired painter in his 60s who has traveled through Asia examining art, saw the blue.

Peering at twenty-five 15th- and 16th-century Persian works under a microscope with Joan Wright, a conservator in the MFA’s Asian department, Harris became captivated with how they were made. “He wanted to know, why do they work this way? What are these pigments? What is the paper?’’ Wright recounts.

Eager to work with the same mediums the Persian artists used, Harris got his hands on some lapis lazuli pigment and mixed the paint himself for “Spring Blossoms.’’ He supplemented it with watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.

“I wanted to make the piece shimmer and glow,’’ Harris says. It does: His expanse of blue, above the knobby top of an elephant’s head, capped with a divot of gold leaf and strung with delicate red blossoms, looks liquid and inviting. “Spring Blossoms’’ has the same elements as “Garden of Truth,’’ except for the elephant’s rider. It’s familiar, but the focus is completely different. The juxtaposition has delicious visual magnetism.

That is one fascination of “Glorious Beasts’’: The contemporary artist’s riff on the older work takes the viewer more deeply into the original piece. For each of the Persian works he chose, Harris made a contemporary drawing that echoes and spars with its inspiration, expanding on certain visual or technical themes and leaving others behind. There are seven Persian works and six by Harris (one artfully blends inspiration from two Persian pieces).

Harris points out the earliest work in the show, the ink drawing “Two Ducks,’’ which dates to the late 15th century. It’s mounted on a green sheet swirling with gold-leaf vine designs; at some point, Wright says, “Two Ducks’’ must have been included in an album, and the green sheet was the album page.

“Two Ducks’’ is the first piece Harris seized on for the show. “I was interested in the Chinese-informed imagery, the way the water is described beneath the ducks,’’ he says, pointing out the passages of churning gestures.

He made “Shimmering Silver Light,’’ a mixed-media drawing that homes in on the large head of one duck and surrounds it with the same spiraling gestures he saw in the water.

Then there was that green-and-gold border. “The illuminist who did that kind of work in studios where calligraphy was being made - it was a man’s world, but the only mention I saw of women in the studio was doing this type of work,’’ the artist says.

He added a similar border, top and bottom, to “Shimmering Silver Light,’’ which accentuates the heady whirl of the paler water in the drawing.

Angie Simonds, a project manager in the MFA’s department on the art of Asia, Oceania, and Africa, worked with Harris on “Glorious Beasts,’’ and she has observed museum-goers responding to it. “I saw a father and daughter standing here, and the girl said, ‘Oh, look, a duck here and a duck there,’ ’’ she says. “They went back and forth, finding connections.’’

For his piece “A Layering of Visions,’’ Harris imaginatively borrowed from a 16th-century album leaf, “Tartar Leading a Horse,’’ and a contemporaneous ink drawing, “Young Bears in a Landscape.’’ Now he eyes “Tartar,’’ which features three smaller works affixed to a beautifully patterned sheet of paper.

“This artist was assembling things, pulled from his own collection,’’ he says. “I’m turning to the MFA as my source.’’