Emily Carr (Nature mystified)

Love her work! Her style reminds me of fairy tales I read when I was young with everything being larger than life. Her trees and sky are very fluid and sensuous.

So dramatic and emotional!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4GXmuhn-o[/youtube]
What an interesting life, too!

Emily Carr - Wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Carr

From her landscape approach:
museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.c … dscape.php

On Light and Motion:

“Light becomes central to the paintings, representative of spirituality and infinite possibility. The frightening and antagonistic side of the forest that figured so prominently in her formal period is absent from the work of this time. Now, light emanates from nature’s forms, creating a mood of joy and jubilation. In such works as [i]Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky[/i] and [i]Above the Gravel Pit[/i], Carr locates spiritual energy within nature itself. Even when she depicts pillaged and devastated trees, as in [i]Stumps and Sky (c.1934)[/i], [i]Forest Clearing (1939)[/i] and [i]Trees in the Sky (1939)[/i], the mood is not one of despair, but of renewal and regeneration. The swirling spirals that make up the sky in [i]Stumps and Sky[/i] hint at a spiritual presence, and the tall, skinny second-growth pines in Trees in the Sky represent the cycle of nature and rebirth.”

‘God is in them all. Now I know that is all that matters. The only thing worth striving for is to express God. Every living thing is God made manifest. All real art is the eternal seeking to express God, the one substance out of which all things are made. Search for the reality of each object, that is, its real and only beauty; recognize our relationship with all life; say to every animate and inanimate thing “brother”; be at one with all things, finding the divine in all; when one can do all this, maybe then one can paint. In the meantime one must go steadily on with open mind, courageously alert, waiting always for a lead, constantly watching, constantly praying, mediating much and not worrying.’

– “Hundreds and Thousands” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p.675.

On Mountains and Movement:

“Images of mountains proved to be the greatest challenge for Carr: her journals contain a number of passages that detail her struggle to infuse such a solid form with movement and energy. She is most successful when she situates the mountain in the distance, as in [i]Landscape (c.1935)[/i], and less successful in works such as [i]The Mountain (1933)[/i]. Despite the light radiating from the sky, the bulky presence of the mountain dominates the canvas and lacks the rhythm present in much of her other work.”

‘Direction, that’s what I’m after, everything moving together, relative movement, sympathetic movement, connected movement, flowing, liquid, universal movement, all directions summing up in one grand direction, leading the eye forward, and satisfying. So to control direction of movement that the whole structure sways, vibrates and rocks together, not wobbling like a bowl of jelly.’

– “Hundreds and Thousands” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p. 701.

On Finding her own style:

“In these works, Carr finally achieved the spirituality in her work that she had been searching for since 1927 when she was so profoundly moved by the work of Lawren Harris. Her landscape canvases and oil-on-paper sketches glisten with spiritual energy and indicate that Carr had finally found transcendence and peace. Her work, at last, is her own: she has discovered her own unique language to depict the power and exuberance of the western landscape.”

'Lawren’s work influenced me. Not that I ever aspired to paint like him but I felt that he was after something that I wanted too. Once I used to think, “How would Lawren express this or that?” Now I don’t think that any more. I say, “Emily, what do you make of this or that?” I don’t try to sieve it through his eye, but through mine.’

– “Hundreds and Thousands,” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p. 738.

Trees:

(wow!)

Group of Seven Influence:

"In November 1927, on her way to Ottawa, Carr had the opportunity to meet Harris and the other members of the Group. Upon viewing their work she discovered a parallel between her own difficulties in portraying the vastness of the west coast and their attempts to represent the northern Ontario landscape. For the first time Carr felt that she was a part of something — participating in the development of Canadian Modernism…

She then went to the studios of the other members of the Group living in Toronto, but it was the work of Lawren Harris that had the greatest influence on her. After she had spent some time in his Toronto studio, Harris became the central figure in Carr’s life, guiding her artistic development and educating her about the importance of theosophy and the role of spirituality in art."

[i]'Oh, God, what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world. Chords way down in my being have been touched. Dumb notes have struck chords of wonderful tone. Something has called out of somewhere. Something in me is trying to answer.

"It is surging through my whole being, the wonder of it all, like a great river rushing on, dark and turbulent, and rushing and irresistible, carrying me away on its wild swirl like a helpless little bundle of wreckage. Where, where? Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created? — a world stripped of earthiness, shorn of fretting details, purged, purified; a naked soul, pure and unashamed; lovely spaces filled with wonderful serenity. What languages do they speak, those silent, awe-filled spaces? I do not know. Wait and listen; you shall hear by and by. I long to hear yet I’m half afraid. I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find. Always he’s seemed nearer out in the big spaces, sometimes almost within reach but never quite. Perhaps in this newer, wider, space-filled vision I shall find him.[/i]’
arttattler.com/archiveemilycarr.html

On criticism:

“Viewers, ignorant of the radical art being produced in Europe, were shocked by the bold palette and lack of detail in her work. Carr had learned in France that negative reception was to be expected and, for the best and most dedicated artists, was actually a badge of honour. At least initially, she was not discouraged: with this exhibition she had introduced Fauvism to conservative Vancouver society.”

'In spite of all the insult and scorn shown to my new work I was not ashamed of it. It was neither monstrous, disgusting nor indecent; it had brighter, cleaner colour, simpler form, more intensity. What would Westerners have said of the things exhibited in Paris — nudes, monstrosities, a striving after the extraordinary, the bizarre, to arrest attention. Why should simplification to express depth, breadth and volume appear to the West as indecent, as nakedness? People did not want to see beneath surfaces. The West was ultraconservative. They had transported their ideas at the time of their migration, a generation or two back. They forgot that England, even conservative England, had crept forward since then; but these Western settlers had firmly adhered to their old, old, out-worn methods and, seeing beloved England as it had been, they held to their old ideals… Nevertheless, I was glad I had been to France. More than ever I was convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours [Canada], her depth, her height, her unbounded wideness, silences too strong to be broken — nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.’

— Growing Pains in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p. 437.

Totems:

'My object in making this collection of totem pole pictures has been to depict these wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting: the identical spots where they were carved and placed by the Indians in honour of their chiefs. These poles are fast becoming extinct. Each year sees some of their number fall, rotted with age; others bought and carried off to museums in various parts of the world; others, alas, burned down for firewood. In some instances the Indians are becoming ashamed of them, fearing that the white people whom they are anxious to resemble will regard them as paganism and will laugh at them, and they are threatening to burn them down.’

— Lecture on Totems in Opposite Contraries, p. 177.

arttattler.com/archiveemilycarr.html

"The work she produced during this time was the most formal and conceptual of her career and the most visibly influenced by external sources. From Lawren Harris, Carr borrowed a limited colour range, emphasis on green and blue hues, smooth geometric shapes and the inclusion of light to symbolize a spiritual presence. Harris also encouraged Carr to read Ralph Pearson’s How to See Modern Pictures, a book that emphasized the importance of design and argued that composition and form took precedence over subject matter.1

Mark Tobey, an artist with whom Carr had exhibited in 1924 and 1925 at the Artists of the Pacific Northwest shows in Seattle, came to Victoria in the fall of 1928 and taught an advanced course in her studio. Tobey proved to be an excellent counterpoint to Harris: he was forthcoming with pragmatic advice and was less interested in Carr’s spiritual and psychological development.2

When she met Tobey, he was embarked on a period of great experimentation and had begun to adopt a Cubist technique of overlapping planes. He encouraged Carr to incorporate movement in her work, to play with perspective and to move toward semi-abstraction with jagged and disjointed forms. Carr toyed with abstraction, but she never felt comfortable taking her work to its extreme conclusion. Her most experimental charcoal investigations were necessary steps in the development of her own unique vision.

‘I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb. I was tremendously interested in Lawren Harris’s abstraction ideas, but I was not yet willing to accept them for myself.’

– “Growing Pains” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p. 457.

“Here she abandoned the documentary impulse and concentrated instead on recording the emotional and mythological content embedded in the totemic carvings. The painterly, Post-Impressionist style that had characterized her work for almost two decades was replaced with highly stylized and semi-abstract geometric forms.”

[i]Skidegate (1928)[/i], painted from earlier sketch material soon after her trip to the east, captures this pivotal moment in her career. Although clearly influenced by the work she had seen in Ontario, Skidegate is less spiritual and symbolic than her paintings from the 1930s and is similar in subject matter to the series she created in 1912. The horizontal sky is less Cubist-derived than the disjointed planes that she later employed in works such as [i]Kitwancool (1928)[/i] and [i]…In the 1928 work, Carr adds light and a sense of spirituality that are absent in the earlier version and exhibit the influence of Harris and his theosophical teachings. "

“After working with Mark Tobey for three weeks, Carr began to explore the relationship between the natural environment and totemic forms. The trees in her paintings were no longer decorative background figures, and she created stylized and semi-abstract foliage out of fragmented geometric shapes. The overlapping triangular greenery in canvases such as [i]Totem and Forest (1931)[/i], Strangled by Growth (1931)[/url] and Zunoqua of the Cat Village (1931) convey a mood of danger and despair, and Carr creates tension in her work by pitting forest against totem.”

'I got a letter from Tobey. He is clever but his work has no soul. It’s clever and beautiful. He knows a lot and talks well but it lacks something. He knows perhaps more than Lawren, but how different. He told me to pep my work up and get off the monotone, even exaggerate light and shade, to watch rhythmic relations and reversals of detail, to make my canvas two-thirds half-tone, one third black and white. Well, it sounds good but it’s rather painting to recipe, isn’t it? I know I am in a monotone. My forests are too monotonous. I must pep them up with higher contrasts. But what is it all without soul? It is dead. It’s the hole you put the things into, the space that wraps it round, and the God in the thing that counts above everything.’

– “Hundreds and Thousands” in The Complete Writings of Emily Carr, p. 668.

"[i]Zunoqua of the Cat Village[/i] is a good example of one of Carr’s more conceptual works from this period. The cats’ eyes and partial bodies are drowning in a sea of foliage, and the separation between the greenery and the feline forms is almost imperceptible. The totemic figure, unlike those in many of her earlier efforts, is gazing not directly at the viewer but at some unknown distant point. Carr’s use of dark colours contributes to the ominous mood of the painting.

In [i]Strangled by Growth[/i], the sculptural foliage wraps itself around the totem, concealing all but the face. Here Carr hints at the ephemeral character of totems. At any point they are subject to being reclaimed by nature and returning to the soil to nourish new trees. The face of the totem seems to be screaming out in fear—a harrowing image. Light is reflected on a few yellow edges of the greenery, creating a divine presence within the foliage itself.

[i]Big Raven (1931)[/i]. Big Raven, one of Carr’s best-known canvases, depicts sinewy foliage circling the foot of the totemic bird. The sky consists of geometric shafts that shine down as the great bird stares nobly away from the viewer, accepting its fate. When this painting is compared to a watercolour depicting the same subject, [i]Cumshewa (1912)[/i], the change in Carr’s style is striking. In the 1912 work the foliage is more painterly and lacks the menacing quality present in the later canvas. The sky in Big Raven is far more spiritual and compelling; in Cumshewa the sky is livelier but also less powerful. The two works elicit quite different responses even though they depict an identical scene. "

Totems: