Emily Carr b. December 13, 1871 Carr was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a modernist and post-impressionist painting style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her work until later in her life. As she matured, the subject matter of her painting shifted from aboriginal themes to landscapes, and in particular, forest scenes. As a writer, Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in British Columbia. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a Canadian icon. In 1898 Carr made the first of several sketching and painting trips to aboriginal villages, visiting Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island, home to the Nuu-chah-nulth people, then commonly known to English speaking people as Nootka. While on holiday in Alaska with her sister Alice in 1907, Carr again came into contact with indigenous peoples in remote villages and determined to use her art to document the sculptural and artistic legacy of the aboriginal people she encountered there. Determined to further her knowledge of the ages evolving artistic trends, in 1910 Carr returned to Europe to study at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Influenced by the post-impressionists and the Fauvists she met and studied with in France, Carr returned to British Columbia and exhibited her French paintings. It was at the exhibition on West Coast aboriginal art at the National Gallery in 1927 that Carr first met members of the Group of Seven, at that time Canadas most recognized modern painters. Lawren Harris of the Group became a particularly important support: You are one of us, he told Carr, welcoming her into the ranks of Canadas leading modernists. The encounter ended the artistic isolation of Carrs previous 15 years leading to one of the most prolific periods, and the creation of many of her most recognizable works. Through her extensive correspondence with Harris, Carr also became aware of and studied northern European symbolism. The Group influenced Carrs direction, and Lawren Harris in particular, not only by his work, but also by his belief in Theosophy, which Carr struggled to reconcile with her own conception of God. Carr’s “distrust for institutional religion” pervades much of her art. She became influenced by Theosophic thought, like many artists of the time, and began to form a new vision of God as nature. She led a spiritual way of life, rejecting the Church and the religious institution, and painted raw landscapes found in the Canadian wilderness, mystically animated by a greater spirit. Carr exhibited in 1924 and 1925 at the Artists of the Pacific Northwest shows in Seattle, and fellow exhibitor Mark Tobey came to visit her in Victoria in the autumn of 1928 to teach an advanced course in her studio. Working with Tobey, Carr furthered her understanding of contemporary art, experimenting with Tobeys methods of full-on abstraction and Cubism, but was reluctant to go to Tobeys extremes. 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. Despite Carrs reluctance, the Vancouver Art Gallery, a major curator of Carrs work, records Carr in this period as abandoning the documentary impulse and starting to concentrate instead on capturing the emotional and mythological content embedded in the totemic carvings, which she did by jettisoning her painterly and practiced Post-Impressionist style in favour of creating highly stylized and abstracted geometric forms. Carr is remembered primarily for her painting. She was one of the first artists to attempt to capture the spirit of Canada in a modern style. Previously, Canadian painting had been mostly portraits and representational landscapes. Carrs main themes in her mature work were natives and nature: native totem poles set in deep forest locations or sites of abandoned native villages and, later, the large rhythms of Western forests, driftwood-tossed beaches and expansive skies. She blended these two themes in ways uniquely her own. Her qualities of painterly skill and vision enabled her to give form to a Pacific mythos that was so carefully distilled in her imagination. Her painting can be divided into several distinct phases: her early work, before her studies in Paris; her early paintings under the Fauvist influence of her time in Paris; a post-impressionist middle period[14] before her encounter with the Group of Seven; and her later, formal period, under the post-cubist influences of Lawren Harris and American artist and friend, Mark Tobey.[29] Carr used charcoal and watercolour for her sketches, and later, house paint thinned with gasoline on manila paper.[30] The greatest part of her mature work was oil on canvas or, when money was scarce, oil on paper.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 12:27:11 +0000
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