While in his mid thirties, Canadian Lawren Harris helped forge a distinctively Canadian style of painting, meant to express the wild nature and vast size of the Canadian landscape. He worked with a group of artists now known as the Group of Seven. Harris' work is known for its stylized abstract modernistic style and simplified composition.

Lawren Harris is the best known of the Group of Seven. His work seems to resonate with his countrymen, expressing in a striking visual manner their feelings of their nation's uniqueness and beauty.

A. Y. Jackson, another member of the Group of Seven said, "Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven. He provided the stimulus; it was he who encouraged us to always take the bolder course, to find new trails."

Moved and humbled by the landscapes he was painting, in time he decided not to sign his work, so that it would be judged on its own merit.

In 1926 at the age of 41, he quipped, "We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, its 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."

His paintings possess a spiritual dimension, often displaying the interplay of light and landscape, as if the land is poetically responding to the light like a heliotropic plant, harmoniously reaching out toward the warmth, energy and illumination descending from above.

While studying art in Germany from 1904-1907, be became interested in Theosophy, a mystical branch of religious philosophy which became evident in his landscapes of the wild nature of Canada's outback. Being from a wealthy family, he was freed from having to remain in the cities attending to his "day job." He had the rare fortune of being able to explore Canada's wilds and devote himself completely to his art.

In the 1920's, he organized painting expeditions to the Algoma Region and the North Shore of Lake Superior. There he developed his style known for its painterly thick impasto with thick decorative colors.

The loosely formed Group of Seven (also known as the Algonquin School) never created a formal manifesto, but they lived and worked with two objectives: to offer a path for cooperation among Canada's artists and to cultivate and develop a distinctive Canadian artistic expression.

The group originally had seven members, Franklin Carmichael 1890-1945, Lawren Harris 1885-1970, A. Y. Jackson 1882-1974,

Frank Johnston 1888-1949, Arthur Lismer 1885-1969, J. E. H. MacDonald 1873-1932, and Frederick Varley 1881-1969. Later, others were invited to join the group: A. J. Casson 1898-1992, Edwin Holgate 1892-1977, and LeMoine FitzGerald 1890-1956. Two other artists are often associated with the group. Tom Thompson 1877-1917 was influential among the Group of Seven, but died prior to the formation of the group.

Emily Carr was associated with the group, but never as an official member.

The Hammer Museum is pleased to present The Idea of North: the paintings of Lawren Harris. They say in their exhibition page, "an innovator on par with the likes of Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The exhibition runs through Jan 24.

5 Years of Exceptional
Exhibitions at SF's de Young Museum

This exhibition featured nearly 100 19th century works from masters who called France their home. Beginning with Bougereau and Courbet along with American ex-pat James McNeill Whistler to works by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Degas, there are abundant examples of impressionism's beauty and diversity. Today, although many art movements have come and gone, the enduring attraction and power of impressionism still remains a

an enduring artistic legacy worth treasuring for all time.

Among the paintings on view were Edouard Manet's The Fife Player, 1866, Frederic Bazille's Family Reunion, 1867, The Birth of Venus by William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879, Berthe Morisot's The Cradle, 1872, Claude Monet's Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of June 30, 1878, and Edgar Degas' Racehorses Before the Stands 1866-68 and The Dancing Lesson 1873-76.

The paintings are now at home at the newly renovated Musee D'Orsay in Paris.

When visitors came to Van Gogh's Starry Night, they would linger. Further along, as they were about to exit the exhibition, something extraordinary happened. Many would turn around, retrace their steps and visit Starry Night again, gazing as if they had never seen it before. With its deeply-colored impasto piled high, observers with tilted heads commented, "Wow, it's amazing how looking at the original is a different experience from seeing it in pictures."

Like the exhibitions from the Musee d'Orsay and the Musee National Picasso, the paintings from the Kunsthistorisches Museum came to the San Francisco while their home museum underwent renovation. Recently, the de Young been able to turn other museums temporary dilemmas into enticing and extraordinary exhibitions for San Francisco's art loving community.

David Rockefeller recruited and encouraged Paley to be President of the Museum of Modern Art. Under Paley's direction, he joined with Rockefeller in buying six works by Pablo Picasso from the Gertrude Stein collection. A painting from this group, Picasso's The Artist's Table was in San Francisco in 2011, part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's The Steins Collect Exhibition.

These were paintings being sold to a secular audience, unencumbered by traditions and authoritarianism still experienced in other parts of Europe.

Vermeer's The Girl with a Pearl Earring shows a young and prosperous girl wearing an exotic dress with an oriental turban, highly stylish at the time, influenced by Dutch trade with the Far East.

The exhibition included works by Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen, Abraham van Beyeren, Pieter Claesz, Garrit van Honthrost, and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Genius is seldom universally recognized in its own time, and such is the case with J.M.W. Turner 1775-1850. He laid the groundwork for impressionism, and blurred the lines of form with expressions of light, drama and power. He influenced Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and the impressionists who followed him.

The most amazing aspect of Turner's works is that they were created mostly between 1840 and 1850. It is most difficult to believe that when J.M.W Turner died in 1851, Claude Monet was only 11 years old.

He was born of aristocratic stock in Sheffield, England. His natural artistic talents lead to a "japanning" apprenticeship, painting landscapes and floral designs on furniture. That early experience proved to be his only formal art training.

Yet, by age 18, he was a notable landscape artist in both England and France. While Edwin was still 18, his family moved to Chicago in 1856 where his father had a hardware store. During and after the Civil War, Edwin did portraits of Civil War heros, exhibiting them at the Chicago Art Academy. He had a promising career within the Chicago art scene. But fifteen years after the family's arrival and courtesy of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, they lost their family business along with much of Edwin's artwork in the Chicago Fire of 1871.

At age thirty-two, Edwin moved to San Francisco where he embraced California. After establishing himself in California, he visited Paris between 1877 and 1879, where he traveled and painted in Europe and exhibited at the Paris Salon. In 1882-1883, he had a studio in Denver, and then returned to the Bay Area where he maintained his residence and studios in San Francisco and Berkeley the rest of his life. Among his artistic triumphs was a series of paintings of California's twenty-three missions. These paintings were helpful in campaigning for the preservation of the missions. He was also invited to be a member of the exclusive California Bohemian Club.

His work owes much to the successful romantic landscape painters he first encountered when he arrived in San Francisco: Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran. His foreground trees silhouetted against sun drenched backgrounds were pleasing to the eye and his works were well received and acquired by the public.

Drive Near the Mission, 1876 Amid a foreground of silhouetted oaks and redwoods, a patch of sun illuminates a lone herdsman on horseback tending cattle with a sun drenched Spanish Mission and mountain in the background. This painting tells of a prosperous moment in the life of late 19th century northern California.

Eglise de Chelles, 1879 This French Gothic church with a shepherd and flock is both architecturally accurate but also spiritual. Deakin's painterly treatment of this scene bears witness to the high esteem he had for the realist and Barbizon painters of France, especially Jean Francois Millet whose L'eglise de Greville inspired Deakin when he saw it at the Musee du Luxembourg.

Christmas Morning, Hotel de Cluny, (after 1880, but not dated) In 1877, Deakin left California for Paris to seek out "the grand and picturesque." During his trip, Deakin sketched often at the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Hotel de Cluny and other notable architectural structures, sometimes with these structures adorned by snow. After his return to California in 1879, Deakin completed a painting entitled A Souvenir of Cluny, depicting a nun feeding sparrows on a snowy winter's day. An art critic of the San Francisco News Letter quipped, "Had the figure been omitted, it would have been a much better picture than it is." Deakin later produced Christmas Morning, Hotel de Cluny, perhaps heeding the critic's advice, featuring a stained glass window rather than the bird-feeding nun.

Humboldt Mountains, Ruby Range Nevada (1882) Two years after he arrived in California, Deakin returned to Chicago on the train to convince his parents and siblings

Roses (1912) In the first decade of the twentieth century, paintings of flowers both cultivated and wild became quite popular, especially in southern California. In Los Angeles, Paul De Longpre painted all kinds of flowers and vegetation, mostly in watercolor. In nearby Pasadena, Franz Bishoff became known as the King of the Rose painters. Spurred by the success of Paul de Longpre and Franz Bishoff, Edwin Deakin decided to offer up some friendly competition by creating some late career floral paintings of his own. As Deakin grew older, he continued to paint and exhibit. In this period of his career, he added paintings of profuse flowers, musical instruments, and other worthy objects to his still life paintings.

Grapes and Architecture (1908) In 1882, Edwin Deakin and his family spent a year in Denver. There, Deakin did new group of studio paintings he called "fruit studies." When Deakin returned to San Francisco, he continued doing fruit still lifes, and he often did grapes in front of stone walls and architecture. These paintings were well received and he continued doing them the rest of his professional life.

Today, Edwin Deakin is remembered as a romantic California painter. The crowning star of his career is a series of watercolor paintings of California's Spanish Missions, a project which he pursued for twenty-nine years. He is also known for his paintings of San Francisco's Chinatown and of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire. He lived his last years in Berkeley, passing at the age of eighty-five.

Linda Sorensen's "Estero Collection"
will remain on exhibit and sale at
Valley Ford's Estero Cafe through November, with changed selections

Open everyday for a great breakfast or lunch
or - newly added - a BBQ dinner, Wed - Sat, 5-9 PM

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art