The Evolution of the Lion

The lion came first.

Not in myth, but in brushstrokes—painted in a moment of awe when Josh Harnack, then a student at Vancouver Film School, created something that genuinely impressed him. It wasn’t a class assignment. It wasn’t for money. It was a lion in a suit, regal and surreal, staring back at him from the canvas. “I couldn’t stop looking at it,” Harnack recalls. “I hung it on the wall and just stared.”

But long before the lion took shape, the spark had already begun to smoulder. Harnack didn’t have a lightning bolt origin story. His path to art was a trail of small, vivid moments—checking out Dungeons & Dragons books from the library just to marvel at the illustrations, copying his older sister’s drawings for praise in elementary school, impressing the girls with charcoal sketches in the 10th grade. He was the kid who won the Grade 5 art award, the teen who kept taking art electives just for the freedom they allowed. In his words, it was never one big epiphany. “It was just a series of pings,” he says—tiny creative pings that added up to something undeniable.

The lion became a visual timestamp. Like clockwork, Harnack returns to it every five years to repaint it, each version more technically advanced. “I might not even keep going more realistic,” he muses. “Maybe next time it’s cubist. Or totally abstract.” The painting’s not just a lion anymore—it’s a reflection of how far he’s come and a reminder that no work is ever really finished.

That belief runs deep through his entire practice.

Take, for example, a painting he created in high school of Tom Hanks in the film Saving Private Ryan, frozen in the moment before death. Years later, he gave the piece to a friend. They reworked it together, layering surreal creatures and inside jokes. It became their ritual, a living collaboration that Harnack planned to update each year. In a downturn of events, the friendship unravelled, and the project ended. The painting found its way back to Harnack after a series of strange events, and now it remains haunted, in a sense. “It was going to be a legacy piece,” he says. “Now it’s something else entirely.”

And still, he paints.

He paints animals—foxes, owls, cats with unnerving expressions. He paints murals, monsters, abstract blobs. He writes poems for his paintings and turns cast-off works into stories. His 2023 show Train of Thought, featured 20 unfinished pieces from fellow Edmonton artists. Harnack painted into each piece, finishing some, transforming others, and writing poems to accompany them. Each painting became a chapter in a larger, loosely connected story about heartbreak, hope, and struggle. He completed much of the work during a residency in Blairmore, Alberta, where passing freight trains disrupted his thoughts so often that they became part of the story. The final piece featured a train twisting around a human figure, visually instilling the metaphor into the narrative. The sold-out show premiered in March 2023 at the Creative Hive. 

This summer, Harnack is heading to a residency in France, a perfect place to get lost in language, colour, architecture, and solitude. “I want to see what happens when I let the place paint through me,” he says.

www.harnack.ca