Lawren Harris Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

New material demands new methods, and new methods fling a challenge to old convention.

For the arts epitomize, intensify and clarify the experience of beauty for us as nothing else can.

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

Mind alone remains stable, and watches the chaos of phenomena, and knows that there is a plastic unity of existence - a changeless harmony - behind the everchanging.

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.

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.

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout.

Are we taking the drunken drivers off the road only to turn them into drunken pedestrians?

(Ars longa vita brevis.) Art is long life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.