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Natural Habitat CONTEMPORARY WILDLIFE ARTISTS OF NORTH AMERICA
Harty grew up in rural Saskatchewan, in a farming community near Canada's border with Montana. His interest in nature was stimulated during his childhood, when he accompanied his father on camping trips to northern Saskatchewan. He was drawing by the age of three and continued to do so throughout his youth, even taking some of his early drawings of animals to the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History to be critiqued by staff artists. From 1975 to 1982, Harty spent several months a year at the Okanagan Summer School of the Arts in Penticton, British Columbia, attending wildlife art classes conducted by Clarence Tillenius. Situated on the Okanagan Wild Game Farm, the school provided him with the opportunity to observe and portray large animals such as grizzly bears, elk, and buffalo. Harty also benefited from contact with painters such as John Clymer, Paul Strisik, Robert Lougheed and Harley Brown, among others. A painter of Western and wildlife subjects who works in an Impressionist manner; Lougheed, was especially influential in Harty's development, encouraging him to work en plein-air, directly from nature. Harty's formal training also involved study at the Art Students League in New York during 1977-78, where he worked under Steven Kidd, David Leffel, Robert Beverly Hale, and others. From 1978 to 1981, he spent part of each year painting with Lougheed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1981, he accompanied Tillenius to Sweden to study the work of the animal painter Bruno Liljefors, whose technical expertise exerted an important influence on him. Harty resides on the outskirts of Dunchurch, a small town in northern Ontario near Georgian Bay. His fifteen-acre property includes a stream, open meadowland, woods and cliffs, all of which appear as background settings in his paintings. Although his work realistic, Harty avoids physical minutiae and the ephemeral. His aesthetic concerns-such as “the shifts in the color temperature of light, or the way in which light is reflected off snow, or how reflected light illuminates the underside of an animal's coat-are those of an Impressionist.” Harty is a member of the Society of Animal Artists, from whom he received the Award of Excellence at the 1993 annual exhibition; he currently serves on the Executive Board. In 1994, he was selected International Artist of the Year at the Natureworks exhibition in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During that same year, he was the first artist-in-residence at the Hiram Blauvalt Art Museum in Oradell, New Jersey. Hary was instrumental in bringing the Society of Animal Artists' annual exhibition to Canada for the first time, in 1995. In addition to wildlife subjects, Harty paints landscapes and has executed large-scale mural and diorama commissions for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, and the Algonquin Park Visitor Center in Ontario, among other institutions. He has also taught at the University of Regina, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson, and elsewhere, and frequently lectures on topics related to wildlife art. His work is represented in public, private, and corporate collections in both Canada and the United States. |
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[Dwayne Harty] [About Me] [Contact] [Photo Gallery] [What's New] [Site Map] |
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Please contact Dwayne Harty with any questions or comments |
An Important member of Canada's younger generation of wildlife artists, Dwayne Harty combines his abilities as a colorist and draftsman with his thorough understanding of the animals indigenous to his rural Ontario home. The process of painting remains vital to his art, as does his study of nature. As he has stated: “It is essential to observe animals in their natural habitat to distill in my mind the essential elements that I will put down on canvas.” His approach has proved highly successful. Harty's work has been described as both “evocative” and “dramatic” and, as noted by Canadian wildlife artist George McLean, his “knowledge of animals and their habitat is evident in each of his paintings.”