Sparring with Lauren Harris (or Churchill 2026)

Decaying shipwreck on the sea ice visited by frigid tourists bruised by the ride in sledges pulled by skidoos.  Definitely worth the trip for the shot.  Well, Joe and Ken, in this blog series I have only lightly sparred with the serene, minimal landscapes of Lauren Harris. My understanding of the North had been moulded by his brushstrokes and, in spite of its two-dimensionality, his vision remains compelling.   The dark line on the horizon is where the sea ice meets the water of the bay. Yet the multi-dimensional reality, in my experience of Churchill, places one’s soul in the centre of an ephemeral, voluminous tent filled with the active, artful acrobats called history, culture, and nature.   An inukshuk -- human-made and human-shaped landmark. That is, Harris's paintings lack the fine human inhabitants and their stories; his canvases ignore aurora, sun dogs, huskies, and tundra chickens; they skip the presence of metal shed architecture and beaded decorations ...

What we were waiting for at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.  It is curious that the renown Canadian artist Lawren Harris while searching for spiritual light in the artic did not concentrate on painting the Aurora Borealis. Perhaps he needed exposure to the enthusiasm of someone with a doctorate in solar physics, like our  instructor Danielle. Perhaps he required her deft descriptions of the Sun’s eleven-year cycle over which time the numbers of sunspots grow and each spot casts gargantuan loops of flowing electrified gas into our star’s atmosphere; loops that arc for days or even months.  Perhaps Harris would be intrigued that during this cycle magnetic field lines twist tighter and tighter across the sun’s surface. Perhaps he didn’t grasp that the blistering outer atmosphere of our star, its so-called Corona, expands into space, not spherically like a shell, but instead blooms like a flower pushing out petals.  Would Harris find the aurora more sublime if h...

 Lawren S. Harris had his icebergs .  Monet's muse was a haystack . Mine?  A rocket launcher. 

What architecture comes to mind when you hear the word ‘city’? What touches the sky? Perhaps skyscrapers or church spires?  Even for a northern city?  In Churchill the sky seems buttressed by the grain elevators in its forlorn port. Agricultural elevators and silos that form a cathedral to commerce,  a basilica that is currently missing its full complement of disciples: engineers, stevedores, and rail workers.  However the atmosphere is filled with optimism that this stasis is about to change. The Federal and Provincial governments' plan a challenging endeavour called the Churchill Plus project, which that combines the railway with a revitalised version of this deep water port. It that succeeds then the treasures of the prairies can be shipped to Europe more efficiently than going through Montreal . This presumes that somehow the ice in Hudson Bay loosens its grip for more than four months. When you imagine ‘downtown’ do you conjure rows of attached shops with big gl...