Famous Emily Carr Paintings
Famous Emily Carr Painting
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. Carr’s 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 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. She used charcoal and watercolour for her sketches. The greatest part of her mature work was oil on canvas or, when money was scarce, oil on paper.
She is also remembered for her writing, again largely about her native friends. In addition to Klee Wyck, Carr wrote The Book of Small (1942),The House of All Sorts (1944), and, published posthumously, Growing Pains (1946), Pause and The Heart of a Peacock (1953), and Hundreds and Thousands (1966). These books reveal her to be an accomplished writer. Though mostly autobiographical, they have been found to be unreliable as to facts and figures if not in terms of mood and intent.
Her life itself has made her a “Canadian icon”, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. As well as being “an artist of stunning originality and strength”, she was an exceptionally late bloomer, starting the work for which she is best known at the age of 57 (see Grandma Moses). She was also a woman who succeeded against the odds, living in an artistically unadventurous society, thus making her “a darling of the women’s movement” (see Georgia O’Keeffe, whom she met in 1930 in New York). Emily Carr brought the north to the south; the west to the east; glimpses of the ancient culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the most newly arrived Europeans on the continent.