Born in Vancouver in 1923, Don Jarvis loved to draw from an early age. An aspiring cartoonist as a teenager, Jarvis enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art and Design (later re-named the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) and was encouraged by his teacher, Bert Binning, to pursue fine art.

When he graduated in 1948, Jarvis won a scholarship . At the suggestion of Lawren Harris, he traveled to New York to study under the abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman. Jarvis returned to Vancouver in 1950 and became a drawing and painting instructor at the School of Art. He remained there for 36 years.

Jarvis believed that each viewer of a work of art brought his or her own perceptions to bear on their experience of that work, and had to use those perceptions to sort out their own interpretation of it.

Don Jarvis passed away in Sechelt B.C. in 2000.