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Peter D. Harris (born 1974 in London, Ontario) is a contemporary Canadian realist painter whose oil paintings cover themes related to the urban landscape.

Biography
Harris was inspired to be an artist by his grandmother, Doris. As a child, they painted rural landscapes together after he came home from school. By the time he was 18, he had expressed a more serious interest in art and spent a month with her in Texas to see if he enjoyed painting full-time. With his interest in art confirmed, he pursued a Fine Arts degree at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 1997.

As he has been inspired by the city from a young age, he now lives in downtown Toronto, Canada. He exhibits his work across North America.

Work
His work is often compared to that of Edward Hopper for its depiction of isolated cityscapes and noir visual influences. He was also inspired by dark comics, such as Daredevil and Spider-Man.

Although his work depicts cities, it is aware of traditional landscape paintings of the American wilderness; he sees his work as inspired by the Group of Seven. In an essay introducing his work, the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, New York, noted that his paintings engage with not only landscape itself, but the way we see landscape: "the means by which we see our land today have become part of the landscape itself . . . natural and the artificial have become inseparable elements in our experience of the land." Although the Canadian landscape is still stereotyped as being rural and wild, Harris thinks that Toronto is just as Canadian as those depictions. To him, it is important to keep up with this shift in art: "For centuries we thought that the natural landscape was the only one worth documenting . . . But people live in cities - more people now than ever before. The stuff around us and what we see every day, that is what we should be reflecting on."

He does not look for beauty in the things he depicted, but the banal and overlooked. Through the use of high contrast, his work can be interpreted as illuminating the parts of the city few others pay attention to: "it's as if the landscape is on a theatre stage, and I can throw a spotlight on what I want people to see, and the rest can fade to black."

Notably, his work does not depict people. This leads to a sense of voyeurism; the viewer can freely look without being looked at. This was an intentional choice to help the viewer to reflect on their own reaction to the scene. He wants his paintings to evoke the solitude he feels in the city in the early morning.

As exemplified by his Hopper's Shadow series, he is also interested in the art historical tradition and the passage of time. According to him, this series, in which Hopper paintings are viewed from outside the building in which they are hung, is "putting a contemporary frame around his [Hopper's] historical works, and comparing not just the style of painting, but also how the city has changed over time." In contrast to the feelings of alienation Hopper was depicting in America in the mid-20th century, Harris believes that "people are much more comfortable in cities now, and it has become more normalized."

Exhibitions

 * New Paintings, 2011, Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON
 * Urbanscapes, 2013, Arts Centre, Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts, Collingwood, ON
 * New Paintings, 2013, Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON
 * night shift, 2014, Galerie d'Este, Montreal, QC
 * New Canadian Landscapes, 2015, Lindsay Gallery, Lindsay, ON
 * Night Watch, 2015, Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON
 * New Canadian Landscapes, 2015, Ottawa School of Art, Ottawa, ON
 * Conversations with Hopper, 2016, Galerie d'Este, Montreal, QC
 * Hopper's Shadow, 2016, Ian Tan Gallery, Vancouver, BC
 * Evening with Hopper, 2017, Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON
 * Undisclosed Locations, 2018, Galerie d'Este, Montreal, QC
 * Machines for Living, 2019, Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, ON
 * Exit Bonaventure and Other Observations, 2020, Galerie d'Este, Montreal, QC

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