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Quote by Lawren Harris

“Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.”

Quote by Lawren Harris

Author

Lawren Harris, born on October 23, 1885, and died on January 29, 1970, was a Canadian painter known for his paintings of the Canadian north. His work, characterized by cold tones and geometric abstraction, has had a profound impact on the Canadian art scene. more

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“Solo artists are generally totally insane. Elton John? Slightly eccentric. George Michael? He's mad as custard.”

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“If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience.”

Ifs May Feelings Artist Views Sky Shapes Mountain Experience Response Paint Finished Canvas Soar Evoke

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“I felt the strange brooding lonely presence of Nature fostering a new race, a new age, and as part of it, a new expression in Art. It was an unfolding of the heart itself through the effect of environment, of people, of place, and time.”

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“Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary, it is a high training of the soul, essential to the soul's growth, to its unfoldment.”

Men Art Soul Growth Essentials Training Art Is Contrary Distraction Amusement

Author:Lawren Harris

“Sometimes, indeed often, we work on a theme with an unformed idea, and, when it has passed through the process, its final result is something we could never have predicted when we commenced.”

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

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“Art is the distillate of life, the winnowed result of the experience of a people, the record of the joyous adventure of the creative spirit in us toward a higher world; a world in which all ideas, thoughts, and forms are pure and beautiful and completely clear, the world Plato held to be perfect and eternal. All works that have in them an element of joy are records of this adventure.”

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“The thought of today cannot be expressed in the language of yesterday.”

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“The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions.”

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“And light has no weight, / Yet one is lifted on its flood, /Swept high, /Running up white-golden light-shafts, /As if one were as weightless as light itself - /All gold and white and light.”

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Book:In the Ward: His Urban Poetry and Paintings

Source: In the Ward: His Urban Poetry and Paintings