Artist Quotes by Lawren Harris

The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.

— Lawren Harris

In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child.

— Lawren Harris

Art must take to the road and risk all for the glory of adventure.

— Lawren Harris

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

— Lawren Harris

Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation: it changes us.

— Lawren Harris

Art is the beginning of vision into the realm of eternal life.

— Lawren Harris

We were told, quite seriously, that there never would be a Canadian art because we had no art tradition.

— Lawren Harris

The power of beauty at work in man, as the artist has always known, is severe and exacting, and once evoked, will…

— Lawren Harris

Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary,…

— Lawren Harris

I myself incline to drift, to accept a lesser situation rather than strive for a greater, and yet, I know that character…

— Lawren Harris

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and…

— Lawren Harris

So long as painting deals with objective nature, it is an impure art, for recognizability precludes the highest aesthetic emotion. All painting,…

— Lawren Harris

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and…

— Lawren Harris

Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of…

— Lawren Harris

“The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has…

— Lawren Harris

If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is…

— Lawren Harris

The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the…

— Lawren Harris

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and…

— Lawren Harris

“No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of…

— Lawren Harris