Emily Carr Quotes

As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth ... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.

There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.

There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.

Over and over one must ask oneself the queston, 'What do I want to express? What is the thought behind the saying? What is my ideal, what my objective? What? Why? Why? What?

How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling ... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.

The sun enriched the old poles grandly ... The mothers expressed all womanhood - the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool.

Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.

Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.

Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it ... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.

Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind ... each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth. So artist, you too from the depths of your soul ... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.

Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same ...

The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.

Inspiration is intention obeyed.

Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.

Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.

Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.

Let me not fuss and fret at my incompetence but be still and know that Thou art God.

Up came the sun, and drank the dew.

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

If the air is jam-full of sounds which we tune in with, why should it not also be full of feels and smells and things seen through the spirit, drawing particles from us to them and them to us like magnets?

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.

Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying ... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery ... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint.

There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning ...

The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.

I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh ... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself.

There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.

I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers' ...

What a splendid time Woo must have had.

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.

The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

Bless ... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.

I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.

I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?

I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.

Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.

The outstanding event was the doing which I am still at. Don't pickle me awayas done.