With vibrant, brightly coloured paint, Ted Harrison reveals an innocent version of Northern Canada. Edward “Ted” Hardy Harrison arrived in Canada in 1967 from Wingate, a coal mining village in northeast England. He brought with him teaching credentials, a quest for adventure, and years of formal artistic training enhanced by travels in India, North Africa, Malaysia and New Zealand.

In 1968, within a year of settling in Carcross, Yukon, he ventured 18 kilometres south of the village to paint en plein air. It was there, in the shadow of Montana Mountain, that he faced down the immense grandeur of the North. “How do I capture the music, the magic of this land?” he told me he asked himself. “Nature here is too powerful.” Frustrated, he returned to his studio. “I felt a streak of rebellion fanning into flame. I’ll damn well paint as I please. I’ll paint my Yukon.”

That declaration, and the iron will to dismiss the naysayers of his earliest Yukon period, sustained four decades of a prolific and undeniably joyful oeuvre. Harrison’s influences reflect the themes of English painters Norman Cornish and L.S. Lowry, also from the working classes, who championed everyday activities—folks huddled in conversation, others braving winter winds, children at play, men at work.

Harrison’s work also recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s domestic scenes and Paul Gauguin’s paintings of familial life in the Marquesas Islands. The curvilinear artistic style and heavy outlining of New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori informed Harrison’s early period, as did Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s quirky, boundary-pushing themes. While Harrison absorbed these influences, he also summoned a uniquely Canadian story that showed viewers the joy in northern life, challenging the notion of a bleak existence in an inhospitable land.

Canada Geese includes the quintessential features that define Harrison’s most productive period: mischievous ravens, little dogs, dancing skies and always tough, resilient humans. In this work, we see graduating shades of violet dominating the sky while fierce winds challenge the humans below. Mountains and stretches of water vibrate in hues of brilliant orange and lemon. The scene is anchored by a radiating sun, Harrison’s symbol of perfection.

But it is the essential simplicity of this painting that underlines Harrison’s genius as an artist and storyteller. We enter a scene where geese streak across the sky. Cold bites the figures in the foreground as they trudge towards a purple-roofed, mustard-coloured house. Wind whips the chimney smoke and laundry flaps from a clothesline, a touching tribute to domestic life. We see, and feel, tenacious inhabitants and equally tenacious, ubiquitous ravens at home in a harsh yet beautiful landscape.

“People are part of the landscape,” Harrison often said. “Each shapes the other.” Harrison delivers this truth through multicoloured clouds, undulating mountains, and people (often children) living and playing amongst tipsy buildings that hug swirling landscapes. Everything, and everyone, moves. As Harrison wrote in his memoir, The Last Horizon, “The North has many faces and many moods. She is kindly, cruel, beautiful, and desolate. Those who live here must shape themselves to her whims.” And it is the whims of this overlooked, and more often misunderstood, Canadian North that shaped the man and his work. This message is beautifully rendered in the quintessential poetry of Harrison’s Canada Geese.

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

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