“How do I paint this sky and these mountains? How can I capture the movement, the music of this land? It is too big, too wild, to put on canvas.”

Ted Harrison expressed this sentiment to me over a glass of Japanese plum wine late one August afternoon in 2005. It underlined his frustration after he emigrated from northern England to Carcross, Yukon, in 1968. As we now know, he eventually found his unique style, one we celebrate and treasure today.

While his work fits neatly into the folk art genre typified by self-taught Nova Scotian painters Maud Lewis and Joe Norris, Harrison stood apart, for he completed four years of college education in art and design. He classified his work as “Naïve Expressionism,” a nod to his formal training.

In 1971, Globe and Mail art critic Kay Kritzwiser attended Harrison’s first solo exhibition, at Robertson Galleries in Ottawa. Her review catapulted him into our national cultural conversation. She wrote, “Take a Grandma Moses dog, add a tilted shack in black Matisse line, put a Miró moon (or two or three) in a sky and you ought to have a painting like any in the exhibition by Yukon artist Ted Harrison.… [The works have] the sophistication of a traditional art education background.”[1]

“I like twisted buildings, I like to use heavy black lines,” said Harrison during one of our interviews. “Sometimes I paint a sun and moon in the same picture. Art is the last free expression of man and so I damn well paint as I please.” And that he did! We might find a pink or blue moose. He often set a paddlewheeler on land—not on a river—and happily posed it beside a church, next to tipsy houses.

Harrison’s artistic talents were paired with his insatiable curiosity and genuine warmth, infused with a quirky sense of humour. His narrative scenes of community life—children sliding on toboggans or chasing ravens, gaily coloured buildings, and often an outhouse—show us what fun it is to live in the North.

Harrison attributed the colours in his paintings to his four years teaching art at General Slim School in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, from 1958 to 1962. Ever the poet, he described that country as a paradise, a “warm flowery land washed by tropical rains.”[2]

Although his work evokes an innocent charm, it evolved from an underpainting of hardships he experienced during a Depression-era childhood. Later, while serving with the British Army in Egypt between 1945 and 1950, he witnessed atrocities that deeply affected him. “There is enough pain and suffering in the world without putting it on our walls,” he told me. And so Harrison chose happy themes with an uncomplicated sense of joy.

The stunning canvas North of Yellowknife (1990) illustrates Harrison’s philosophy. We see a fascinating depiction of a landscape that takes us to the top of the world in vibrating motion. His swirling skies dominate a diminutive human camp that is but a footnote in this work, underscoring the power of the natural world both on, and above, the land.

Harrison’s work reminds us that happiness can be found in what lies just beyond our front doors: folks waving to each other, playful dogs, shadows on snow, and mischievous ravens. And above all, as Harrison shows us, happiness also lives in the profound beauty of each sunrise and sunset.

Among the many awards the artist received during his lifetime are five honorary doctorates and the Order of Canada. His work hangs in private, public and corporate collections across Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Germany, Malaysia, Denmark, South Africa and Japan.

We thank Katherine Gibson, author of Ted Harrison: Painting Paradise, for contributing the above essay.

1. Kay Kritzwiser, art review, Globe and Mail, January 29, 1971.

2. Ted Harrison, The Last Horizon (Toronto: Merritt Publishing, 1980), 71, as quoted in Katherine Gibson, Ted Harrison: Painting Paradise (Victoria: Crown Publications, 2009), 93.

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