MONT GEIKIE & LES REMPARTS PEINTS PAR LAWREN HARRIS

 

 LAWREN S. HARRIS (1885-1970)

Mont Geikie  - Les Remparts (3,298 m - 10, 820 ft)
Canada (Colombie-Britannique)

 

 In The Ramparts Tonquin Valley, Rocky Mountains huile sur panneau, 27,1x37,5cm, 

Fondation Sobey pour les Arts, Canada 

La montagne 

Le mont Geikie  (3,298 m - 10, 820 ft), prononcé comme " geek ", est un sommet montagneux situé en Colombie-Britannique au Canada. Situé à 28 km au sud-ouest de Jasper près de la vallée de Tonquin, le mont Geikie est le plus haut sommet de la chaine des  Remparts (Ramparts) dans les Rocheuses canadiennes, l'une des plus belles destinations de montagne au monde. Son sommet le plus élevé le plus proche est le mont Fraser à 8 km au sud-est ; le Continental Divide se trouve à 3 km à l'est.  Le mont Geikie est composé de quartzite de la période cambrienne, une  roche poussée vers l'est  au-dessus d'une roche plus jeune au cours de l'orogenèse Laramide.  Le mur vertical de sa face nord mesure plus de 1 500 mètresde haut et a été comparé aux autres grandes faces nord des Rocheuses canadiennes telles que North Twin, Alberta et Kitchener. Les  Remparts se trouvent en partie dans le Parc national de Jasper en Alberta et dans le parc provincial du mont Robson en Colombie-Britannique. 10 sommets font partie de cette chaine, dont le plus élevé est le mont Geikie  La plupart ont été nommés par le Club alpin du Canada et portent des noms sur le thème du génie militaire tels que Bastion, Parapet, Redoute et Dungeon.  Ils forment la limite ouest de la vallée de Tonquin. 

 
Le peintre
Lawren S. Harris  est né à Brantford, en Ontario, en 1885. La famille Harris a fondé l’entreprise de machinerie agricole Massey-Harris (aujourd'hui Massey Ferguson). C'est assez dire que les activités artistiques de Harris ne connaîtront jamais d’obstacle financier !  Dès l’enfance, il commence à dessiner et à peindre à l’aquarelle, puis il se rend à Berlin en 1904 pour y faire des études en arts. Harris devient un adepte de la philosophie théosophique, une interprétation mystique de la doctrine religieuse, qui joua un rôle déterminant dans sa vie et dans son oeuvre. Le style impressionniste de Harris utilise des couleurs riches et vives pour illustrer les thèmes récurrents de la beauté de la nature. Au fil des ans, son style évolue vers l’abstraction. Après avoir parcouru l’Europe et le Moyen-Orient, Harris revient au Canada à l’âge de 22 ans et s’établit à Toronto. Il s’investit activement dans l’Arts and Letters Club de Toronto, où il rencontre les autres membres du futur Groupe des Sept et partage avec eux les philosophies artistiques modernes qu’il rapporte de l’étranger. En 1913, de concert avec le Dr James McCallum, il finance la construction du Studio Building, sur la rue Severn, à Toronto, pour offrir à ces artistes un endroit où ils peuvent vivre et travailler ensemble, afin de créer un nouveau genre d’art canadien. Harris finance aussi de nombreux voyages à Algoma, en Ontario, et est considéré comme responsable de la formation officielle du Groupe des Sept. Il meurt en 1970.

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2022 - Wandering Vertexes ....
            Errant au-dessus des Sommets Silencieux...
            Un blog de Francis Rousseau

 

THE RAMPARTS PAINTED BY LAWREN S. HARRIS

 LAWREN S. HARRIS (1885-1970)

Dungeon Peak - The Ramparts (3, 219 m - 10, 266 ft)  

Canada

 In The Ramparts Tonquin Valley, oil on canvas,  no dating

The mountain 

Dungeon Peak (3, 219 m - 10, 266 ft) is located on the border of Alberta and British Columbia. Named in 1916, Dungeon peak is one of the 10 named peaks by the Alpine Club of Canada part of The Ramparts, such as Bastion, Parapet etc.. They form a western boundary for the Tonquin Valley. Amethyst Lake lies to the east, while the headwaters of the Fraser River bound it to the west.

The Ramparts are a mountain range in the Canadian Rockies; part of the Park Ranges, they straddle the Continental Divide and lie partly within Jasper National Park in Alberta and Mount Robson Provincial Park in British Columbia.

The first ascent of Dungeon peak was made  in 1933 by  Rex Gibson, R.C. Hind, E.L. Woolf

The most famous cliimbing route is East Face IV 5.7, another of the prominent east-facing rib routes. Not quite as aesthetic as the E Face of Oubliette (2 days climbing route) but still a very worthwhile outing. Mostly a rock route but take ice gear for both the ascent and descent.


The painter 
Lawren Stewart Harris was a leading landscape canadian painter. An inspirer of other artists, he was a key figure in the Group of Seven and gave new vision to representations of the northern Canadian landscape. During the 1920s, Harris's works became more abstract and simplified, especially his stark landscapes of the Canadian north and Arctic.  He also stopped signing and dating his works so that people would judge his works on their own merit and not by the artist or when they were painted.
In 1924, a sketching trip with A.Y. Jackson to Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies marked the beginning of Harris' mountain subjects, which he continued to explore with annual sketching trips until 1929, exploring areas around Banff National Park, Yoho National Park and Mount Robson Provincial Park. In 1930, Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, travelling to the Arctic aboard the supply ship SS. Beothic for two months, during which time he completed over 50 sketches.  "We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, tis call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America."
(Lawren S. Harris, 1926)
For Harris, art was to express spiritual values as well as to represent the visible world. North Shore, Lake Superior (1926), an image of a solitary weathered tree stump surrounded by an expanse of dramatically lit sky, effectively evokes the tension between the terrestrial and spiritual.
The resulting Arctic canvases that he developed from the oil panels marked the end of his landscape period, and from 1935 on, Harris enthusiastically embraced abstract painting. Several members of the Group of Seven later became members of the Canadian Group of Painters including Harris, A. J. Casson, Arthur Lismer, A. Y. Jackson, and Franklin Carmichael.
From 1934 to 1937, Harris lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he painted his first abstract works, a direction he would continue for the rest of his life. In 1938 he moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, and helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, an organization of artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction.
In 1969, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Harris died in Vancouver in 1970, at the age of 84, as a well-known artist. He was buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, where his work is now held.
On November 26, 2015 his painting Mountain and Glacier was auctioned for $3.9 million at a Heffel Fine Art Auction House auction in Toronto, breaking the previous record for the sale of one of Harris's works.
In 2016 a film about Harris's life, Where the Universe Sings, was produced by TV Ontario. It was created by filmmaker Peter Raymont and directed by Nancy Lang.

DUNGEON PEAK PAINTED BY ROBERT GENN

ROBERT GENN (1936-2014) 

Dungeon Peak (3, 219 m - 10, 266 ft)  

Canada

The mountain 

Dungeon Peak (3, 219 m - 10, 266 ft) is located on the border of Alberta and British Columbia. Named in 1916, Dungeon peak is one of the 10 named peaks by the Alpine Club of Canada part of The Ramparts, such as Bastion, Parapet etc.. They form a western boundary for the Tonquin Valley. Amethyst Lake lies to the east, while the headwaters of the Fraser River bound it to the west.

The Ramparts are a mountain range in the Canadian Rockies; part of the Park Ranges, they straddle the Continental Divide and lie partly within Jasper National Park in Alberta and Mount Robson Provincial Park in British Columbia.

The first ascent of Dungeon peak was made  in 1933 by  Rex Gibson, R.C. Hind, E.L. Woolf

The most famous cliimbing route is East Face IV 5.7, another of the prominent east-facing rib routes. Not quite as aesthetic as the E Face of Oubliette (2 days climbing route) but still a very worthwhile outing. Mostly a rock route but take ice gear for both the ascent and descent. 

The painter 

Robert Douglas Genn  was a Canadian artist, who has gained recognition for his style, which is in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting.  His work is in corporate and public collections, including Air Canada, Bank Of Montreal, Canadian General Insurance, Canadian Airlines, Canadian Utilities, The Churchill Corporation, Expo '86, Esso Resources, First City - California II, Highfield Oil & Gas, Molson Brewery Ltd., Montreal Trust, Shell Resources, University of Alberta, Westgate Chevrolet, Glenbow Museum and Government of Belgium.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Genn has often been compared with  members of  the 1920s Canadian Group of Seven.  In 1961, he met Lawren Harris who was a neighbour in Point Grey, Vancouver. Genn had problems with painting skies, and Harris's advice was to turn the picture upside-down: "Paint down from the trees to the clouds at the bottom of the picture to get the perspective right." Genn said this was "valuable advice", which enabled him "to control the gradation, and work up into the trees in a more abstract manner."

He ran the Painter's Keys web site, a worldwide artists' community, with his staff and volunteers. The web site sends out an erudite free twice-weekly newsletter, which is sent to 135,000 artists in over 100 countries, and claims the largest collection of art quotes online with over 5,382 authors quoted. 

In 2005, Genn campaigned against the Chinese website, arch-world.com, which was selling thousands of high-resolution images of around 2,800 artists' work illegally, without permission. After failing to gain support from the Canadian government or the African embassy in Ottawa, Genn used his web site to enlist subscribers' support to email objections to the arch-world, resulting within days in over 1,000 online complaints from artists, dealers and politicians to the company and governments. This stimulated a diplomatic protest letter to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Trading and Law Department from the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. Genn credited the campaign with the subsequent removal of images by 800 Canadian artists from arch-world, although many works were reinstated on arch-world soon after.

Genn has been a member of the Board of Directors at Emily Carr College of Art & Design.

Genn announced in his Twice-Weekly Letter of 25 October 2013 that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  He died at his Surrey, British Columbia home on 27 May 2014.

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2016 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau