FROM THE EASEL TO THE BIG SCREEN
Documentary on artist Lawren Harris opens Friday at Canadian Cineplexes
Toronto-based documentarian Peter Raymont has focused his lens on a range of great Canadians over the years, from retired general Roméo Dallaire to genius pianist Glenn Gould to iconic artist Tom Thomson.
But it is his recent film about the seminal Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris that this Friday will crack the barrier that has kept Canadian documentaries in repertory theatres and television.
Where the Universe Sings: The Spiritual Journey of Lawren Harris opens in Cineplexes in five Canadian cities — Ottawa, Halifax, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
In Ottawa, the film will be screened at Cineplex Odeon South Keys Cinemas.
“People want to know more about Harris, about his works, about what he was like, what he was feeling, what his private life was like,” says Raymont.
Interest in Harris these days is surging, he says. Actor-comedian Steve Martin is in no small part to blame, having used his celebrity clout to champion Harris. Martin, who appears in Raymont’s film, co-curated an exhibition of Harris’s paintings that was held in Boston, Los Angeles and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Following last summer’s AGO exhibit, Harris’s 1928 painting Mountain Forms sold for $11.2 million when it was auctioned in Toronto last November, breaking a Canadian art record.
Raymont’s film, one of many from his White Pine Pictures production company, approaches Harris’s life and work from many angles.
Colm Feore speaks as the voice of Harris in the film, reading letters that the artist wrote.
Actor Ben Low plays Harris painting at the exact sites where some of his most renowned and magnificent paintings were created. While the scenes may be re-creations, they can be breathtaking.
“It’s a film that deserves a bigger screen,” Raymont notes of its many visual pleasures.
The film features more than 130 Harris paintings that show his evolution from figurative artist to the visionary creator of more abstract art. The documentary consults widely with Harris experts and also includes insights and family photographs from the late artist’s grandchildren.
Harris was born in Brantford, Ont., in 1885 to a wealthy family, and being well-off allowed him to concentrate on his art. In his early 20s, he studied art for four years in Berlin. Harris was married in 1910 and soon after he and painter J.E.H. MacDonald formed the Group of Seven. In the mid-1930s, Harris controversially left his wife for another woman — charges of bigamy were even threatened by his first wife’s family.
With his second wife, Harris lived for several years in the United States — “excommunicated from Canada,” Raymont says — before they moved to Vancouver in 1940. There, Harris, who died in 1970, fully embraced abstract painting.
“When he started painting abstract, they didn’t sell (as well as his landscapes),” Nancy Lang, an artist and the co-director of the film with Raymont, has told the Canadian Press. “And yet he still did it. He still pursued that, and that’s unusual in an artist.”
“Turning points is what you’re looking for, and the struggles,” Raymont says of the rich narrative arc that Harris’s life afforded his film. “There was a lot of grist for the mill.”
Raymont, a 66-year-old who won an Emmy Award for Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, says that his upbringing in Ottawa primed his fascination for Canadian artists and their depictions of the natural world.
Raymont grew up in New Edinburgh and attended Lisgar Collegiate. As a student, he viewed Group of Seven paintings at the nearby Lorne Building on Elgin Street when the National Gallery of Canada was housed there.
Around the same time, summercamp trips gave Raymont the opportunity to embrace the outdoors.
“Ottawa was very formative for my appreciation of art and nature,” he says.