Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970

Dominion Gallery, Montreal

Adelaide Galleries, Toronto

Roberts Gallery, Toronto

Private Collection, Toronto

Joan Murray and Robert Fulford, The Beginning of Vision, Lawren S. Harris, The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris, Toronto, 1982, pp. 164 and 190

This work has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition. There are some touch ups at the edges of the bottom left cornerof the masonite. The work is signed lower right but possibly not in the hand of the artist. However, this does not put the authenticity of the work in doubt.
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These two abstract paintings represent a major phase in Harris's long and productive career. He painted abstract paintings for more than thirty years, longer than he painted the varied landscapes of the various regions of Canada.

The trajectory of his development as an artist was a long, slow arc from representation to abstraction, slower than, but parallel to, Wassily Kandinsky's, with whom he shared many beliefs with respect to the aesthetics and purposes of art. Closer to home, his progression is also similar to that of J.W.G. Macdonald, or Jack Bush, both of whom started off, as Harris had, and arrived, by different paths, at much the same destination as painters.

Harris's later work has been slow to achieve the recognition it deserves. The production of these later works was exceptional in both its volume and intensity: Harris painted steadily and vigourously until his death in 1970.

Harris wrote:

There is at once more imaginative scope and a more exacting discipline in non-objective painting. I have had ideas insistently forming which could not be expressed in representational terms.

The reason I do not use titles for abstract paintings is that it is impossible to get their meaning into words. A title, therefore, is likely to interfere with the onlooker's direct response.