Lawren Harris was a Canadian landscape painter and one of the leaders of the Group of Seven. Among the artist’s subjects was Canadian north and Arctic which he often depicted in the abstract style.
Background
Lawren Harris was born on October 23, 1885, in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He was the first son of Thomas Morgan Harris, secretary of A. Harris, Son and Co. Ltd, and Anna Stewart. In 1891, Harris’s father became one of the founders of Massey-Harris Co. Ltd. Lawren was raised in the wealthy family.
Education
Lawren Harris studied at Central Technical School and Saint Andrew's College in Toronto. Then, Harris enrolled at the University of Toronto where one of his mathematics professors pushed him to pursue his studies in the art field at the capital of Germany. The young man came to Berlin in 1904 and had spent four years there. During the stint, Harris produced his first street scenes in post-impressionist style.
Lawren Harris stated his artistic career as a founder of the Group of Seven in 1911 along with J. E. H. MacDonald. The studio for the group members was organized in Toronto.
In order to find new subjects for their art, the Group travelled to the Algoma region in 1918 and 1919, then to Lake Superior's North Shore where the artists produced a lot of landscapes.
Since 1924, Harris created his first mountain series after the trips to Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. Among them were Above Lake Superior (1924) and Maligne Lake (1924).
At the beginning of the 1930s, the artist made some trips to the Arctic and produced about fifty sketches. They became a basis for the artist’s shift from landscapes to abstract style.
In 1933, the Group of Seven was dismissed and the rest of its former members, among whom was Harris, founded the Canadian Group of Painters. Five years later, the artist relocated to Sante Fe, New Mexico and took part in the creation of the Transcendental Painting Group in 1939 which gathered the painters who practised the spiritual form of abstraction.
In 1940, Lawren Harris settled down in Vancouver where he had lived and worked till the end of his life. During this period, Harris’s abstract non-objective artworks, like Abstract Painting No. 20 (1942), were often influenced by his passion for the Theosophy.
While alive, the artist had only two retrospectives, in 1948 and 1963.
Winter Comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone
Lake and Mountains
Shoreline
Afternoon Sun, Lake Superior
Abstraction
Abstract Painting #98
Hanover Abstract
North Shore, Lake Superior
Untitled
LSH 21
Winter Landscape with Pink House
Nature Rhythms
LSH 83
Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains
Views
Lawren Harris was fascinated by philosophy and Eastern thought while a teenager. Later, the artist revealed his interest in theosophy and became a member of Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society.
Quotations:
"Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure."
"Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life."
"Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary, it is a high training of the soul, essential to the soul's growth, to its unfoldment."
"Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world; a world in which all ideas, thoughts, and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear, the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal. All works that have in them an element of joy are records of this adventure."
"The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature – a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions."
"Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation – it changes us."
"In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child."
"Beauty is a living abiding presence completely untouchable by all the devices of man, such as moral codes, creeds, intellectual analysis, games and cliches, the acquisitive instinct, or lust for anything whatsoever."
"The power of beauty at work in man, as the artist has always known, is severe and exacting, and once evoked, will never leave him alone, until he brings his work and life into some semblance of harmony with its spirit."
"It requires courage to face and to conquer the immense weight of inertia and the dead and dying traditions and sophistications that clutter the minds of men and mould them into the mimicry of living ways..."
"If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience."
"We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, tis call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America."
Membership
Group of Seven
,
Canada
1911 - 1933
Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society
,
Canada
Connections
On January 20, 1910 Lawren Harris married Beatrice Phillips. The couple had three children – two sons whose names were Lawren P. Harris and Howard K. Harris, and one daughter Margaret Anne Harris. Lawren P. Harris followed his father's steps and later chose the career of the artist.
Later, Harris met Bess Larkin Housser Harris and fell in love with her.
When the artist’s first spouse, Beatrice Phillips, was 24, Lawren Harris left her and without receiving the divorce married Bess in 1934. Later, he was accused in bigamy by his ex-wife.