Snow Day!

Winter comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, 1935, Lawren Harris

One snow day is perfect: a surprise, a gift from nature, a moment out of time. More than that, and it gets tiresome, the kids start squabbling, and everyone feels housebound. 

Our visit from the so-called Polar Vortex this week was perfectly timed. This is an old friend gussied up with a new name. In my youth, we just said the arctic air was dipping down from Canada. In Winter comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, above, Lawren Harris painted exactly that phenomenon. As a native of Brantford, Ontario he would have been very familiar with it.

Winter Landscape with Pink House, 1918, Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was the scion of a family of wealthy industrialists—after mergers and acquisitions, his family business comes down to us as part of the Massey Ferguson Company. Because of this, he could be the silent supporter of his other Group of Seven painters. With Dr. James MacCallum, he financed the group’s studio building in Toronto.

Pine Tree and Red house, Winter City, 1924, Lawren Harris

But Harris was no wealthy dilettante. Of the Group of Seven, he traveled the farthest in his search to represent the Great White North, from an Art Nouveau-inspired realism in the teens and twenties to complete abstraction at the end of his career.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!