We now know, as science has shown us, that forests are vast connected communities that communicate and cooperate, that can listen, smell and perhaps even think. They have networks of fibers and fungi, a way of sharing resources like water and sunlight.
But before these discoveries, Carr intuited that web of life and captured it on paper and canvas in her own unique way. She wrote, “I am always asking myself the question, what is it you are struggling for? What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there?”
Her red cedars undulate with life like living muscle; her skies and light are complex actors and have vibrancy like a painting by Vincent Van Gogh.
“The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things,” she wrote. She felt the connection of things. A biographer, Doris Shadbolt, wrote that Carr had managed to “hang on to a vestige of primal spirit affinity with all the forms of creation.” She said Carr had created a “Pacific mythos.”
Carr wasn’t limited to the idea of “pristine” nature. She painted landscapes scarred by humans — logged, mined, abused. She was not afraid to look at a clear-cut. She could find the beauty and energy where trees and sky met gravel pits and stumps. She could connect where others might only feel sadness. “Mother Earth,” she mused, “will hide it away in her ample brown folds and purify and absorb its good, bringing it back to usefulness.”
Carr takes her viewer into the forest’s dark places too, like moving through multiple drapes into an interior space at once alive, mysterious, inviting, oppressive.
My father worked on a logging-camp survey crew deep in the old growth on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1930s at the time Carr was painting her forest pictures. He described places that were silent, where sound was muffled. When the forest went quiet, he said, you might spot a bundle in the canopy above, likely a traditional Indigenous tree “burial” of a deceased ancestor.
If much of her work captures, as one critic put it, the “trembling luminosity” of the sky, she also painted the intensity of the coastal forest that can seem like a living womb or tomb.
Great art is unique but speaks to a larger truth — often feelings that are hard to put into words or images.
Before science uncovered secrets of living forests, Emily Carr’s paintings captured their essence, and their knowing.
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November 11, 2022 at 08:04PM
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Mossback's Northwest: The remarkable vision of artist Emily Carr - Crosscut
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