Carr, Emily

The Art of Emily Carr

The Complete Writings of Emily Carr

Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings

Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr

Growing Pains: An Autobiography

Completed just before just before her death in 1945, Growing Pains is Emily Carr's carefully-crafted portrait of an artist: her girlhood in Victoria, B.C.; her training as a painter; the initial rejection and eventual acceptance of her painting by the Canadian people. This autobiographical collection is invaluable for revealing the face she wanted to show the world and the rich texture of her life.

Emily Carr: An Introduction to Her Life and Art

"Some can be active to a great age but enjoy little," observed Emily Carr shortly before her death in 1945. "I have lived." The impressive scope of Carr's art and her unorthodox life are the subjects of art educator Anne Newlands' latest book. In a text that skillfully blends selections from Carr's own writings with illustrated commentary, Newlands creates a delightful look at one of Canada's best-known artists. Emily Carr: An Introduction to Her Life and Art will lead you to the West Coast, where Carr spent much of her life in a world of richly drawn First Nations villages and totems, dark, haunting forests, wild beaches and vast skies. There, you will meet the unconventional woman -- "the little old lady on the edge of nowhere," as she called herself -- who helped define the face of Canadian art.

Emily Carr

Seven Journeys: The Sketchbooks of Emily Carr

Emily Carr (1871-1945) was an extraordinary Canadian artist and writer. She is now a national cultural icon and is considered one of the great artists of the Americas. She found inspiration for her paintings in the lush and towering rain forests of the British Columbia coast and in the compelling totem poles that stood in Native villages.

This book is based on a special cache of small drawing books that offer a direct connection with Carrís hand, eye, and mind. Spanning the years 1927 to 1930, at a turning point in her life when she was in her mid-fifties, these sketches record seven significant journeys -- to isolated Native villages in coastal British Columbia and to eastern Canada to meet fellow artists in the Group of Seven. Two of the journeys were metaphorical -- to abstraction and to nature itself -- but both were an intrinsic part of all the others, as well as a part of the process of developing the powerful painting style that is uniquely hers.

Doris Shadbolt presents a selection of more than 80 of Carrís drawings. Her text, animated by quotations from previously unpublished writings by Carr, takes us along on these journeys, echoing the intimacy and immediacy of the drawings themselves.

Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr

Unsettling Encounters radically re-examines Emily CarrÂ’s achievement in representing Native life on the Northwest Coast, and her goals and achievements in representing Native villages and totem poles in her paintings and writings. Reconstructing a neglected body of CarrÂ’s works that was central in shaping her vision and career makes possible a new assessment of her significance as a leading figure in the history of early twentieth-century Modernism.

Unsettling Encounters includes a vivid recreation of the rapidly changing historical and social circumstances in which Carr painted and wrote. She lived and worked in British Columbia at a time when the growing settler population was rapidly taking over and developing the land and its resources. Gerta Moray argues that CarrÂ’s work takes on its full significance only when it is seen as a conscious intervention in settler-Native relations. She examines the work in relation to the images of Native peoples that were then being constructed by missionaries and anthropologists and exploited by the promoters of worldÂ’s fairs and museums.

CarrÂ’s famous, highly expressive later paintings were based to a great extent on the results of her early experience. At the same time they were a response to new currents in North American culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Moray explores CarrÂ’s participation in the Group of SevenÂ’s agenda to build a national culture and her sense of her own position as a woman artist in this masculine arena.

Unsettling Encounters is the definitive study of CarrÂ’s "Indian" images, locating them both within the local context of Canadian history and the wider international currents of visual culture.

Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr