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Lawren Harris - From the Abstraction category:
Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Adventure category:
Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Art category:
Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Beauty category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Beauty category:
For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Beauty category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Change category:
Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation – it changes us. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Change category:
Mind alone remains stable, and watches the chaos of phenomena, and knows that there is a plastic unity of existence – a changeless harmony – behind the everchanging. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Character category:
- to Catharine Whyte...
I myself incline to drift, to accept a lesser situation rather than strive for a greater, and yet, I know that character in life and art is only made by an effort that is quite beyond one's ordinary everyday acceptance of things as they are. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Collaboration category:
In the evening by lamp or candlelight each showed the other his sketches. This was a time for criticism, encouragement and discussion... (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Collaboration category:
- as said privately to Robert Genn in 1961...
Independence is good for awhile. As a movement we were more readily noticed and believed in. And for a while there, we enjoyed each other's company. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Conviction category:
It requires a conviction that every people has a unique contribution to give to mankind, and that this they must make or remain sterile, subservient, sallow, and that this contribution they must have commenced to make before they can hope to understand the spirit that informs all great works and inspires all noble living. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Courage category:
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... (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Desire category:
- in a letter to Emily Carr...
Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Enthusiasm category:
We lived in a continuous blaze of enthusiasm... Above all we loved this country and loved exploring and painting it... (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Experience category:
It was an ever clearer and deeply moving experience of oneness with the spirit of the whole land. It was this spirit which dictated, guided and instructed us how the land should be painted. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Experience category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Fire category:
Burn them at the wood stove. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Future category:
I felt the strange brooding lonely presence of Nature fostering a new race, a new age, and as part of it, a new expression in Art. It was an unfolding of the heart itself through the effect of environment, of people, of place, and time. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Growth category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Ideas category:
- in a letter to Emily Carr...
Sometimes, indeed often, we work on a theme with an unformed idea, and, when it has passed through the process, its final result is something we could never have predicted when we commenced. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Innocence category:
In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Joy category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Language category:
The thought of today cannot be expressed in the language of yesterday. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Life category:
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. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Light category:
And light has no weight, / Yet one is lifted on its flood, /Swept high, /Running up white-golden light-shafts, /As if one were as weightless as light itself – /All gold and white and light. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Methodology category:
New material demands new methods, and new methods fling a challenge to old convention. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Nature category:
So long as painting deals with objective nature, it is an impure art, for recognizability precludes the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting, ancient or modern, moves us aesthetically only in so far as it possesses a force over and beyond its aspect. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Nature category:
Visible nature is but a distorted reflection of a more perfect world and the creative individual viewing her is inspired to perceive within and behind her many garments, that which is timeless and entirely beautiful. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Perseverance category:
We worked from early morning until dark in sun, grey weather or in rain. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Spectator category:
The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Studio category:
Tom did not want a studio in the Building. It was altogether too pretentious for him... There was a dilapidated old shack on the back of the property... We fixed it up...and he [Tom] lived in that place as he would a cabin in the north. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Studio category:
- description of the boxcar hauled up the line by freight train to chosen destinations for Group of Seven artists:
...a few windows, four bunks, a stove, water tank, sink, cupboard, two benches and a table. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Tradition category:
We were told, quite seriously, that there never would be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Understanding category:
Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye – finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Unknowns category:
- in a letter to Emily Carr...
I don't suppose you do know precisely what you are after. I don't think in the creative process anyone quite knows. They have a vague idea - a beckoning, an inkling of some truth - it is only in the process that it comes to any clarity. (Lawren Harris)
Lawren Harris - From the Work category:
I need to get to work and disregard all the silly vagaries of personal feelings. Always somehow if one keeps working, something comes through. (Lawren Harris)
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