Tony Harris has had a love of art since he started doodling in school notebooks in Grade 3.
Becoming a trained teacher, he gave up the classroom to develop his craft. A special commission for the Ottawa Senators helped open the doors to the NHL over two decades ago. It was a portrait of former Ottawa Senator’s coach Roger Neilson that now hangs at the Roger Neilson Children’s Hospice at The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
“I really enjoy being a child of the ‘70s. I really enjoyed that era of sports. Sports is my passion for art,” Harris said. “People that I worked with at Roger Neilson’s hockey school years ago, we just had connections—one lead to another in the NHL, the NHL Players’ Association, then I just started collecting different teams to work for, doing milestone paintings.”
Harris’s work is now well known in hockey circles. He’s done dozens of commissions for NHL players and teams. For the NHL’s 100th anniversary, Harris created portraits of each of the top 100 NHL players.
Now, with hundreds of hockey canvasses to his name, Harris’s talent was on full display Sunday afternoon after the Washington Capitals’ Alexander Ovechkin set a new NHL record for the most goals scored, beating Wayne Gretzky’s record of 894.
The paining honouring this milestone took 48 days to complete and, according to Harris, it’s multiple portraits in one: Ovechkin, the Stanley Cup, and Gretzky.
“I like the details of hockey equipment, I like the uniforms, I like the way they look. I love colour, so, to me, it’s like I want someone to look at it and have it be something that they’ve seen before, that they can relate to,” Harris said. “Those sorts of things make you feel like I must be on the right path, like I’m doing something at a level that is being recognized and people are enjoying. It’s just turned out to be a great adventure.”
If you’d like to see more of Harris’s work you can find more here https://thfineart.ca/
