Lawren Phillips Harris

Cowley Abbott Auction House Biography and Notes

Born in Toronto, Ontario, his parents provided him with an artistically rich background. He attended Upper Canada College, Trinity College School and Pickering College. At his father's studio and at home he was stimulated by the conversations of the Group of Seven. From his father (Lawren S. Harris) he learned much about painting but his formal training was received at the Central Technical School, Toronto, and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He received valuable criticism from his father and from A.Y. Jackson. He spent five or six years working with the human form and then turned to landscapes which he painted in a highly topographical manner. He then began to formalize his subject matter and to reduce the amount of detail and explained this phase as follows, "These rather austere renderings, tended to become somewhat geometric and cubistic, and I became excited by the resulting shapes, forms and patterns, for their own sake, and which now seemed to me to exist in their own right . Such generalization, soon evolved into decorative symbolism, where an area of farm-land yielding various crops, resembled smoothly-flowing colourful rugs, over-laying a gently-contoured earth feature. The depictions, perhaps reminiscent of Grant Wood, finally led me to the verge of semi-abstraction - but, as the Second World War had developed in earnest, I left my studio for a tank."