In the summer of 1930, A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris undertook their now famous trip to the Arctic on board the supply ship Beothic. The ship traveled extensively: to Godhaven on the coast of Greenland, north to Etah, on into the Kane Basin, back south along Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island and the Hudson’s Straits, to Chesterfield Inlet, and then south along the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. This trip was the culmination of Harris’s Canadian travels, and the resulting works would epitomize his expressions of the Canadian land in terms of simplicity and spiritual purity. Following on the tails of his Lake Superior and Rockies explorations, the remote Arctic landscape, largely unpopulated and astonishingly vast, allowed Harris to focus on light, natural structure, and distance, and to explore icebergs, ice floes, pack ice, islands and mountains as primary subjects. Prior to 1930, Harris had sought to simplify and refine his painting to reflect his deep commitment to the landscape and the ideas of theosophy. Here in the Arctic, the landscape was already refined, devoid of distraction, clutter, and compositional confusion. As well, as the mountains of the Canadian west had been a metaphor for the quest for eternal truth Harris found icebergs to be an even more appropriate symbol to explore in his work. Harris read and was heavily influenced by Rudolph Steiner. In his journal Lucifer-Gnosis, Steiner compares the physical states of matter and spirit to those of water and ice – they are both the same thing in different states, where matter is equal to water, and ice is equal to the spirit. It was through enlightenment that a change in the state of matter could take place and transform it into spirit, just as water transforms into ice. For Harris, the Arctic was a place where profound transformation could occur, and icebergs were evidence of it. In this radiant work, Harris has painted an iceberg he observed in Smith Sound, somewhere off the east coast of Ellesmere Island at a latitude of about 78° north, in remote stillness. Harris had a remarkable ability to convey the idea of spiritual serenity in his paintings, and this is an outstanding example of it.

The sounds of wild weather and the constant din of activity aboard an Arctic icebreaker would have surrounded Harris on the trip. The Beothic encountered the worst storm that the captain had ever seen in the region in Baffin Bay, and was trapped by ice for days in Lancaster Sound. The constant loading and unloading of supplies, hustle of activity and noise, were in stark contrast to the serenity of the oil sketches he made during the trip. The simplicity of these works, wherein light and form are the prime subjects, hint at the move toward abstraction that was to come in the next five years, and convey Harris’s respect for the simple beauty of the land. Ice Berg, Smith Sound, II is a luminous work, theatrical in its composition and laden with Harrisisms. The iceberg itself is the main subject, set dead centre in the work and some distance away. Its distant, towering form floats by as we gaze at it in a moment of privileged observation. The transitory nature of ice, melting slowly as it moves south toward its demise, would also resonate with Harris’s philosophy, and with his sympathy for the transitory nature of life, beauty, and youth. The simple palette of blue, yellow, white and grey conveys both the austere scenery and the perfection of this region in Harris’s eyes. Harris was very interested in the idea of reincarnation and rebirth. The radiating bands of light in Ice Berg, Smith Sound, II, speak of this idea and are quite unique - a further development of the halo-like layers of light found in a number of his mountain and Arctic works. The iceberg is gift-like, presented to us as an offering signifying enlightenment. The backdrop of thin bands of low-lying cloud contains the scene, and the choppy seas, the distance we must cross to seek enlightenment, are all that lie between us and our spiritual progression.

http://www.heffel.com/auction/Results_Lot_E.aspx?ID=13992
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/Lawren-Harris.html
https://www.wikiart.org/en/lawren-harris/all-works/text-list
https://www.artoronto.ca/?p=35494
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https://torontolife.com/culture/art/lawren-harris-mystic/
http://www.nationhood.ca/html_en/module_core.cfm?tab=2&modNum=8
http://www.artnet.com/artists/lawren-stewart-harris/2
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