Emily Carr

Emily Carr (1871-1945) was born the same year her home region of British Colombia became an independent Canadian province. Despite rebellion against rote practices and cultural hypocrisies in her church upbringing, struggles with doubt and passing interests in Transcendentalism and Theosophy, Carr determined that she needed a relationship with Christ. Named Klee Wyck (the Laughing One) by her Native friends, she could also be curmudgeonly and cantankerous. She spent much time apart from society. Nonetheless Carr was very aware that she could not find her own true expression without engaging with that of others and so pursued education and exposure in San Francisco, London, St Ives, Paris and rural France. She experimented with numerous trends in modernism – such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism – but her two dominant and often interwoven themes remained the same: the forested West Coast and the art of its First Peoples. In 1927 Carr met and was greatly encouraged by the Group of Seven, artists in Eastern Canadawho pursued a distinctly Canadian response to nature. After this she produced most of her best-known work. During Carr’s lifetime the general populace more readily received her published writings than her visual art and in 1942 her book Klee Wyck was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Literature. Today, however, Carr is one of Canada’s most renowned visual artists.