Waving Hills is a spectacularly scaled and brilliant painting by Ted Harrison, an artist known as the quintessential painter of the Yukon. Harrison was born in the working-class town of Wingate, County Durham, Northern England in 1926 and did not arrive in the Yukon until 1968, after deployments to East Africa and India with the British Armed Forces and teaching posts in Malaysia and New Zealand. Although the colours and energies of these locations would stay with him throughout his career, the distinctive style he is now renowned for only emerged when he arrived in northern Alberta in 1967. He was offered a grant to write and illustrate his first children’s alphabet book as a teaching tool, depicting northern and Indigenous ways of living. He took stock of local animals, food preparation, industry, shelter, social dynamics and natural formations that would later shape the iconography of his northern paintings for decades to come.

After accepting a new teaching position in Carcross, Yukon, a village two hours south of Whitehorse, Harrison’s iconic vision began to coalesce, finally reaching its full force after he relocated to Whitehorse. He painted lively and populated town scenes amongst vernacular buildings, backed by the expansive skies that would come to dominate his more monumental late works. Harrison’s signature imagery made use of flat areas of saturated colour, often divided by uniform graphic lines, creating an elemental and propulsive visual language deftly tuned to conveying the majesty of the Yukon. According to Harrison: “By a process of retrogression and simplification I threw out all the academic bric-a-brac which had stratified my thoughts. From there, my personal view of the Yukon began to emerge, leading to greater freedom of line and colour.”

In Waving Hills, the landscape dwarfs the traces of human life, here just a tiny cluster of buildings nestled at the bottom of the work. Two figures walk closely together, depicted in a “matchstick” style reminiscent of the busy city folk populating the Manchester paintings of Lawrence Stephen Lowry (1887 – 1976). Here, natural features dominate as repeating bands of orange, blue, purple and pink undulate across the painting, outlining the landforms and ocean horizon as they pulsate together. The mountains and clouds separate into a nearly symmetrical composition around the central island, giving the sense of a supernatural or spiritual occurrence. A lone raven hovering in the bottom left corner—a recurring motif for Harrison—symbolizes the proudly independent and solitary nature of northern living.

Harrison’s work was wildly popular during his lifetime, receiving accolades and adoration from far and wide. His increasing exhibition schedule led him to give up his teaching position to paint full time in 1979. Harrison received the Order of Canada in 1987, and in 1988, the year this work was completed, his work appeared on the front cover of Reader’s Digest magazine. The demand for his work has only grown since his death in 2015, serving as testament to the ongoing appeal of his optimistic and resonant vision of northern life.

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