Emily Carr - A Portrait in Memory

The painter Emily Carr once wrote: "It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada, but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of." And Emily Carr truly was part of it, with magnificent and passionate paintings and writings about the wilderness, aboriginal art and people and her own life. 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of her death, and to honour this great artist's life, Rewind presents a documentary called Emily Carr: A Portrait in Memory. It first aired on CBC Radio in 1958 and is presented by Elspeth Chisholm.  

Carr's work, both painting and writing, embodied the west coast of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. She gloried in trees and sky, totem poles, and aboriginal culture. Her paintings soared, and her writing did too. Here's Emily Carr's description of the paintings of Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris:

"They seem to call to me from some other world, sort of an answer to a great longing. As I came through the mountains I longed to cast off my earthly body and float away through the great pure spaces between the peaks, up the quiet green ravines into the high, pure, clean air. Mr. Harris has painted those very spaces, and my spirit seems able to leave my body and roam among them." 

In her time, Emily Carr, or Millie as she was known to her friends, was often regarded as an eccentric. She kept a pet monkey and chipmunks and ignored the social conventions of post colonial Victoria, making friends with people regardless of their social standing.

Some of the people who knew painter Emily Carr best were the Group of Seven artists A.Y.Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and Lawren Harris, as well as the Montreal art dealers Max Stern and Marius Barbeau who mounted an art exhibit in 1927 that brought Carr's work to public attention.

​In 2013, an Emily Carr painting called The Crazy Stair set an auction record when it sold for $3.39 million.

Emily Carr was inspirational in her paintings and her writing, but she has also inspired musicians. One of them is Veda Hille, whose album Here is a Picture was composed with inspiration from the diaries of Emily Carr. One song from that album called is called Working. Hille says the song's melancholy tone invokes in her an appreciation for the British Columbia coastal rain forests in which Carr regularly worked. Tall, dense, and dark stands of fir, hemlock and cedar trees cloaked in misty, rainy grey fog set a sombre scene for many of her works. Emily Carr had a deep love and respect for the B.C. landscape, which comes through loud and clear in her paintings and her words. 

More of Emily Carr's art is featured in the Emily Carr collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is hosting an exhibition of her work until August 9 called From the Forest to the Sea. See more here. http://www.ago.net/emilycarr

The last word goes to Emily Carr herself. She had such a love and respect for the B.C. landscape, which comes through loud and clear in her paintings and her words.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.