Tuesday, April 26, 2005

The Forest Lover

Emily Carr is one of Canada's greatest and most loved artists. Feeling a spiritual connection with her subjects, Emily Carr painted both the landscape and native villages of Western Canada in a unique and modern style that was rejected during its time of production. After years of travel throughout the forests of British Columbia, failing health caused her to remain close to home where she wrote seven books based on her life. Today Emily Carr is highly regarded throughout the world and considered a national icon in Canada. Through reading her books and the study of her paintings one is able to grasp just how incredible this woman was.

I have just completed the wonderful novel by Susan Vreeland The Forest Lover which explores Carr's life and work. Like Vreeland, I too "discovered" Carr in the early 1980's on a trip to the McMichel Collection in Toronto, Canada. You can't help being moved by her emotional paintings of the pacific northwest and the primordial forests she loved. Nor can the reader help being moved by Vreeland's portrayal of this amazing woman.
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1 comment:

gabrielle said...

Thanks for reminding me of Emily Carr. Two years ago I had a student at Art Quilt Tahoe who was using a Carr piece as inspiration for her design. Such a great sense of emotion about nature...which naturally i relate to strongly. Hope you will try a quilt with carr's work in mid.

12:57 AM

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PURLS OF WISDOM

"Color is the real substance for me, the real underlying thing which drawing and line are not."
--Sam Francis

"The great man is one who never loses his child's heart."
-- Philosopher Mencius

"We wear our attitudes in our bodies."
-- Patti Davis

Colour embodies an enormous though unexplored power which can effect the entire human body as physical organism.

Colour is a means of exercising direct influence upon the soul.
--V. Kandinsky
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way.. things I had no words for.
--Georgia O'Keeffe

Nothing is really work unless you'd rather be doing something else.
--J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Faith is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
--E. L. Doctorow

Somebody once said that people become artists
because they have a certain kind of energy to release, and that rings true to me.
--Dale Chihuly