Halrais Oil Paintings

A brief history of the life and work of the Canadian artist and founding member of the Group of Seven.

The first complete biography ever published of Group of Seven artist and spokesman Lawren Harris. Lawren Harris (1885-1970) is among the most iconic of Canadian artists. Harris was an outspoken defender of modernism, and a very private person. In this gripping, sympathetic account, James King writes about Harris’ public persona as the spokesman for the Group of Seven as well as his championship of Canadian art and artists. Born to great wealth, Harris spent much of his existence selflessly promoting Canadian painting and the interests of his fellow artists. But Harris’ own personal struggle to become an artist was long and complex, and he was beset by much turmoil throughout his life. When, early in 1930, he achieved his creative peak – in paintings such as North of Lake Superior – he turned his back on representational art and spent the remainder of his career becoming an abstract painter. Harris’ unhappy first marriage, his flight to New Hampshire and New Mexico, his sometimes overbearing attitude towards younger artists, and the full magnitude of his inner struggles are all dealt with fully in this sensitive, engaging narrative that captures the complexity of the man behind the mask.

"Lawren S. Harris is best known for his iconic landscape paintings that declare a sense of cool Canadian resilience. Yet, in the 1920s, an audacious and more colourful interior world began to emerge in his work, and by 1934, he had taken a seemingly unexpected turn toward a transnational career in abstract painting. The social, intellectual, and aesthetic milieu of American transcendentalism shaped a movement of abstract art across North America. Inspired by the ideas of Kandinsky and informed by the writings of Emerson and Whitman, Harris and his North American contemporaries - Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Katherine Dreier, Raymond Jonson - turned to abstraction to express higher states of consciousness. As Harris's career progressed, as he ascended from mountain tops to inner states of mind, he sought greater and more ethereal spiritual heights. This magnificent volume features reproductions of more than 75 paintings by Harris and his contemporaries. Essays by Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens investigate Lawren Harris's exploration of modernity and the evolution of his work towards a form of abstraction that enthusiastically embraced the energies of the ambient visual culture"--

"Peggy Harris is known for her adorable oil paintings of baby animals...lovingly known as "Harris Critters" by her thousands of fans. Now, with this book, you can learn Peggy's fun, exciting and virtually foolproof method of painting cute, cuddly creatures!" "In eleven step-by-step projects, Peggy shows you how to paint puppies, kittens, bunnies, fawns, ducklings and other favorite subjects...with the same friendly teaching style that's made her television show such a success." "You'll discover Peggy's secrets to creating expressive eyes, cottony-soft fur and fluffy feathers; simple solutions to common painting problems; and clever ways to use easy-to-find, everyday "tools" to make your animal paintings irresistible!"--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Publisher description

This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.