Michael Harris is a self-taught painter, songwriter and world traveller from Toronto. Michael studied graphic design at George Brown College before eventually deciding to focus on fine art and painting. Backpacking through Europe at the age of 19 followed by a year long stay in Australia had awakened Michael to the liberating effects that extended travel can have on one’s perceptions and assumptions. So in 1993, he packed up his oil paints and brushes and set off to immerse himself in a variety of unfamiliar and often challenging environments. That journey took him to Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia, Nepal, India, Greece, Turkey and the UK. Since then, he has devoted himself to developing his personal approach to painting in oil, and has been involved in many successful group and solo exhibitions, as well as receiving several corporate and private commissions. Michael ’s controversial series of paintings “The Crucified Mountie” at Peterson Fine Art Gallery, featuring the familiar icon of Canadian culture on the cross brought him into the public consciousness in Toronto.

Michael has been primarily represented by Gallery 133 in Toronto’s “Design District” for the past five years, where his haunting and atmospheric landscape paintings have become increasingly sought after by top Toronto designers and art enthusiasts. He has also been represented by Art Interiors in Forest Hill since 1994. 

 “I am hesitant to label these paintings as “landscapes”. They have nothing to do with “land” in any real sense. They are not interpretations of the experience of a particular place bound by a particular moment in time. The paintings are unplanned, spontaneous improvisations; they tend to reflect a state of mind rather than the state of things.” 

“It seems to me that my recent paintings, whether it’s the landscapes, the multiple figures climbing each other, or the large figure paintings – they are all somehow descriptions of a kind of transcendence of the mundane; the mental, physical and spiritual boundaries that we invest so much energy in sustaining.”

                                                                                        Michael Harris