Painting the Canadian Soul:
Emily Carr

Emily Carr (1871-1945) was a painter and writer. She was an independent spirit from an early age, and after being orphaned in her teens went to art school in California. Following study trips in Europe, she returned to B.C. and adopted a "vigorous, colourful, postimpressionist style of painting." Carr visited Native village sites and painted harrowing images of vanishing cultures. Unable to live on the income from her art for many years, she built and ran an apartment house in Victoria before she embarked on a new direction in her art - inspired in part by the Group of Seven. Her bold landscape paintings captured the spirit of the West Coast and earned her modest praise. When her health deteriorated, she turned to writing, and in 1941 won a Governor General's Award for Klee Wyck. In today's lecture we will look at her life and works, view representative works of her art, and talk about issues of voice and "appropriation" in her works.

* Lecture Notes *

PowerPoint Slides

 

Reading:

No readings [so that you can focus on your term paper]

Web links:

Emily Carr: http://collections.ic.gc.ca/EmilyCarrHomeWork/

Artwork: http://collections.ic.gc.ca/EmilyCarrHomeWork/gallery/bcarmain.htm

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/totems/contents.htm

Historica Minute about Emily Carr

Books about Emily Carr

The Complete Writings of Emily Carr. One volume compilation of Emily Carr's writings. Introduction by Doris Shadbolt (1997)

Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr (1987)

K. Dodd. Sunlight in the Shadows: The Landscape of Emily Carr (1984)

R. Gowers, Emily Carr (1987)

Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, Emily Carr: The Untold Story (1978)

Gerta Moray, Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr (2006)

A. Newlands, Emily Carr: An Introduction to Her Life and Art (1996)

D. Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1973)

Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (1979)

---. "The Dark Spirit of Emily Carr," Canadian Forum 69/790 (1990), 7-9

---. Emily Carr (1975)

Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography (1979).

Marguerite Turpin, The Life and Work of Emily Carr: A Selected Bibliography (1975).

K. Walker, This Woman in Particular: Contests for the Biographical Image of Emily Carr (1996)