Even as a boy Dwayne Harty remembers his gripping fascination with animals. He was overcome with the urge to capture their form, colour, movements - and for Harty, painting became a natural outlet for that passion.
That keen interest took him to a prestigious school, and around the world, allowing him to see and capture places with his brush. Yet, his latest journey - painting with the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation project – is by far the most rewarding.
Growing up in a small Saskatchewan town Harty attributes the early years of his interest in the outdoors to experiences camping, hunting and fishing with his father.
“I think for me, the interest in art came once we moved out of rural Saskatchewan, out of the small town into the city of Regina,” said Harty.
There, his love for the out of doors drew him to the city’s natural history museum.
“I started talking to the staff people, staff artists and that's what really started this interest was encouragement. Everybody needs encouragement.”
After a number of interactions and support from influential people, who became friends - Fred Lahrman, Clarence Tillenius and Bob Lougheed – Harty won a small scholarship and attended the Art Students League art school in New York City. Following school, Harty spent four years with Lougheed, who invited him to work with him in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“So I’d spend half the year working with Bob, return to Canada to work wherever I could to get the money to go back down,” he said. “I learned more from Bob in the first six months with him, than I've learned anywhere. He's awesome. He's just a wonderful teacher.
“After four years with Bob, I had to make a living," he said, with chuckle.
Harty returned to Canada and began doing book illustrations of animals.
And from there, he painted a number of dioramas for museums including the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, the Wye Marsh Visitor Centre (in Midland, Ontario), the Royal Ontario Museum (in Toronto, Ontario) and the Western Development Museum (in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan).
“It was a time when museums were embracing the idea of dioramas across Canada (and it) kept me really busy in that field,” he said. “Really, dioramas are an art form, they're an educational tool and they're very expensive.”
The largest diorama Harty has painted is at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, and depicts the Costarican rain forest. Three storeys high and 120 feet around, it took the artist just over a year to complete.
“It is interesting, because it was designed well. The visitor walks out on the second storey level and there’s forest canopy above and forest canopy below, so it looks like you're in the midst of high-elevation forest canopy. So the sense of height was pretty well achieved. I spent three nights and four days in a tree house in the rainforest (taking photographs, sketching and painting).”
In his 30s Harty began getting offers from Toronto to develop dioramas there and bought a home near Dunchurch. Not long after that, Algonquin Park was celebrating its 100th anniversary and built a very large visitors centre on the east side. Harty was asked to create all the dioramas and murals in the visitors’ centre, a two-year project.
In 1996, he was commissioned by the Royal Canadian Mint to create two separate sets of four coins in platinum and silver. That same year, he was also commissioned by Wildlife Habitat Canada to create the Federal Migratory Duck Stamp.
Through all this work though, Harty did find free time to paint for pleasure.
Five years ago, he was giving a lecture on wildlife art at the University of Montana at the Mazula Campus when he met lawyer and environmentalist Harvey Locke. While chatting, they discovered a common interest/passion for Carl Runguis.
“Runguis is generally considered in the top three or four greatest wildlife painters of all time. Runguis is really the cornerstone of my little world,” explained Harty. “Because Harvey is obviously the face of Yellowstone to Yukon he said, 'have you ever thought about painting from the Yellowstone to Yukon?' And it sounded like pie in the sky to me. I knew nothing about their organization.”
According to its website: “One of Yellowstone to Yukon’s (Y2Y) primary goals is to ensure that the Yellowstone to Yukon region retains enough connected, well-managed and good quality-wildlife habitat so that animals can safely travel between protected areas”
The organization was established in 1997 by Locke as well as conservationists and scientists and is funded through grants, sponsorships and fundraising events. The Y2Y region covers 1.3 million square miles, spans five American states, two Canadian provinces and two Canadian territories.
“It's a very ambitious, massive conservation initiative to connect existing sanctuaries of land from just north of the Red Desert in Atlanta to North of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon,” explained Harty. “So they participate in land acquisition and in fact, sometimes initiate it and fund some of the scientific research and their science behind it.
“Just having pockets of land set aside is fine, but probably not good enough, because the pockets of land, regardless of their size, become idle if they’re not connected. So their theory is to acquire land over a very long time and connect all existing sanctuaries so the grizzly bear can roam north and south – borderless. That way their gene pool is kept as fresh and vibrant as it can possibly be,” he said. “Where if they’re restricted into small pockets there's less likelihood of that.”
Two years after their initial meeting, Harty came on board with the project, agreeing to paint from Wyoming to the Arctic Circle.
Harty’s work will be one third of the total works selected by the curators of the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies for an exhibition.
“The majority of the other paintings will be primarily works by Carl Rungius,” said Harty, who describes Rungious as the greatest painter of North American big game. “I have been chosen as the 'living thread' to the exhibition and the only commissioned artist to that purpose. I have been commissioned by Y2Y to follow in the geographic footsteps of Carl Rungius and to also depict the 17 ‘areas at risk’ as designated by Y2Y along this Rocky Mountain corridor from Wyoming to the Yukon.”
Harty has committed to do between 24 and 30 pieces, about 16 inches by 20 inches and some larger pieces, 30 inches by 60 inches.
“I would paint the corridor, but loosely follow in Runguis’ geographic steps, because he was the last one to paint that corridor extensively,” he said. “The curators of both museums want the ‘start to finish’ of my work. That will include: on location paintings in oil and pencil drawings; composition designs in oil or watercolor; animal drawings and studies in oil or charcoal drawings and the finished paintings in oil.”
Harty went on a several field trips, the first was in 2008 from late June until the end of October, where he painted as much of the Y2Y corridor as he could.
He started near the Wind River Mountains near Cora, Wyoming, where Carl Rungius first traveled west. Harty then traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, photographing and painting in the Teton mountains, and gathering landscape material on the threatened pronghorn antelope migratory corridor.
“Travelling north I concentrated on Yellowstone Park and north through the Bob Marshall Wilderness area of Montana, which included the National Bison Range and the Glacier/Waterton Parks area of Montana and Alberta,” Harty explained. “Glacier/Waterton Parks is the world's first international peace park and is designated as a world heritage site.”
The most extraordinary field trip for Harty came in November 2008 when he took a one-month horseback trip in the Muskwa-Kechika Mountains of northern British Columbia on the Yukon border with author, photographer, conservationist and guide Wayne Sawchuk.
“We flew for an hour into our base camp to the headwaters of the Prophet River - very, very remote. There, for a month, we crested mountain passes and forded glacial rivers through snow storms, rain, snow and sunny weather,” Harty recalled. “It was extremely rigorous and definitely not for the faint of heart. It was glorious. We saw 13 grizzly, five wolverine, stone's sheep, mountain goats, wolves, mountain caribou, moose and elk. The pure, untouched quality to this region was a marked spiritual experience for me. I felt so fortunate to be embraced by the awesome scale of the land. Every third day was a rest day and that is when I painted.”
Next, Harty worked out of Whitehorse, Yukon, where Runguis also traveled in 1904. From there Harty headed out near Dawson City, Yukon up the Dempster Highway where he camped in the Tombstone Mountains sketching and photographing “as much of that incredible fall colour as I could.”
On his return from the Tombstones, Harty drove from Carmacks to Farro, Yukon and spent two days observing Fanin Sheep, which are now considered a genetically separate species.
From Farro, Harty went into an even more remote country, the Russell Ranges of the Ogilvie Mountains along the MacMillan River.
“I got all the way to the North West Territory border - wild, untouched country along an old survey road,” he said. “The weather was bad and the roads so washed out that at times I was pushing water up over the hood of my truck. It took me two days to travel the 150 miles to the North West Territory border and two days back. On the way back I camped at the foot of Mount Sheldon. It was a pilgrimage for me. The fall colours and fresh snow were incredible - although I was sleeping in the truck in temperatures of minus 9 - 10 degrees.”
At this point Harty had covered most of the northern Y2Y corridor. He then headed south to Banff and Lake Louise, Alberta, where he hiked into Lake O'Hara and Lake McArthur.
During his 2009 field season, starting in July, Harty travelled from Banff to Creston and Invermere, British Columbia, where Y2Y is doing important work in the Columbia Wetlands and the Rocky Mountain Trench. He then went on to Fernie, B.C., and Flathead River in Alberta.
This past fall, Harty travelled for two weeks into areas he had yet to document: Jasper Park south along the Icefield Parkway to Banf; and the Rocky Mountain Front region of Montana, high into the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming on horseback, up to 11,500 feet in elevation.
“We brought the Rungius book with us and found the exact spot that Rungius had painted several of his sketches. Little has changed,” he said. “That's it for now until next summer when I'll cover the last two Y2Y areas: eight-day rafting trip along the Nahanni River of the North West Territory - Dall Sheep and Grizzly bear; and the Peel River Watershed along one of the three rivers either the Bonnet Plume River, the Snake River or the Wind River. Then I'm done travelling.”
These trips have been overwhelming for Harty to see extremely remote, pristine and untouched pieces of the world.
“It has been humbling to observe truly wild grizzlies where their immediate response is to flee the sight or smell of man - he is to be avoided. And the important fact is that -- in these areas there is still room for them to avoid us. These areas must be set aside. I rue the day when my children cannot savour or appreciate that blessing,” Harty said. “It was truly a privilege to be able to share such a connection to a land few seldom see. That is the trajectory I wish to pursue with my art - the amazing world of wildlife and the awesome grandeur and beauty of the wilderness they inhabit.”
Capturing wildlife from Wyoming to the Yukon
Dwayne Harty's Yellowstone to Yukon traveling exhibition opens the summer of 2011 first at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming; the Peter and Catherine Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta, opening summer 2012; and the Salmagundi Club in New York City opening winter of 2011.
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