Beatrice Harding

Saskatchewan NAC Auction House Biography and Notes

Beatrice Harding was born on a farm near Morden, Manitoba in May 1913. She worked as a high school teacher at Regina's Central Collegiate in the 1950s. She set out in mid-life to travel the globe with her husband who worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She lived and studied on four continents: in Liberia, West Africa; Guyana, South America; Somalia, East Africa; Philippines and New York from 1961-75. Upon her return to Regina in the mid-70s she enrolled in the University of Regina, where she became the only senior citizen of her class to earn a Bachelor in Fine Arts. Over recent decades she created hundreds of prints in her basement studio, held several art showings at such places as Regina's Norman McKenzie, Assiniboia and Rosemont Galleries and the Carnegie Gallery in Ontario, and participated in numerous artists' co-ops. Beatrice Harding described her own prints as "images, both realistic and abstract, that relate to the environmental spaces around her and to the global images beyond. She passed away March 22, 2006.