Her distinctive paintings have depicted the forests and indigenous cultures of western Canada for nearly a century.
Born in 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia, she received art training in California and London. Early on, she visited Native American villages on Vancouver Island and in Alaska, which led to her artistic mission of documenting the forests, the vanishing totems poles and ways of life of the First Nations.
Although her contemporaries adopted modern art approaches such as Cubism, she said: “I am not ready for abstraction. I cling to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice.”
Later in her life, she bought a caravan that she nicknamed “The Elephant," towing it to the remote landscapes she painted.
Carr’s later paintings revealed her anxiety about the ecological and social effects of industrial logging on the lives of Indigenous people. They depict the cleared land and the tree stumps that, she wrote, “are their own tombstones and their own mourners."
My favorite Emily Carr painting depicts a grove of living trees. It is named “Among the Firs,” and is housed at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. Standing before that canvas, I gained a vivid sense of the towering scale of the trees, the energy of the forest and a sense of spirituality from the mist and light that filtered through the dense foliage.
In that painting, Emily Carr conveyed both the beauty of the forest and the losses we will feel if we lose it.
