Emily Carr: Into the Forest

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Emily Carr, "Wood Interior," 1932–35

oil on canvas, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery,Emily Carr Trust

The Vancouver Art Gallery is home to the finest collection of Emily Carr works in the world. While we are fortunate to have major works from throughout her career, the Gallery’s collection is particularly rich in her forest paintings from the 1930s. These include both her canvases and oil on paper works, a medium she began using during that period. Supplemented with a generous loan of three key early works completed during 1913-1918, and the remarkable Grey, both from private collections, this exhibition highlights her continued explorations of the natural environment—from the formative days of her career to the final stages of her life.

Carr captured the coastal forest landscape, generally around her Victoria home, in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art. Carr exulted in the symphonies of greens and browns found in West Coast forests. With oil on paper as her primary medium, Carr was free to work outdoors in close proximity to the landscape. She went into the forest to paint and saw nature in ways unlike her fellow British Columbians, who perceived it as either untamed wilderness or a plentiful source of lumber. While others thought of the forests as impenetrable and unappealing, Carr saw the vitality of the natural world and seized the opportunity to express her vision of it. The paintings of the forest profoundly shaped not only Carr’s own work but the way British Columbians perceive their surroundings to this day. 

Emily Carr: Into the Forest reflects Carr’s direct engagement with and deep affection for British Columbia’s landscape as a site of artistic and spiritual inquiry. Far from feeling that the forests of the West Coast were a difficult subject matter, Carr exulted in the symphonies of greens and browns found in the natural world. With oil on paper as her primary medium, Carr was free to work outdoors in close proximity to the landscape. She went into the forest to paint and saw nature in ways unlike her fellow British Columbians, who perceived it as either untamed wilderness or a plentiful source of lumber.

Emily Carr took on a strong individual and mystical representation of her surrounding landscape and explored her oneness with the universe, which she believed was inherent to nature. By animating the natural forms in her paintings, Carr unified natural and spiritual elements into an innovative compositional style that was emblematic of the development of modernist art in Canada and the West Coast.

“Since her first solo show at the Gallery in 1938, Emily Carr’s work has been a focal point of the Gallery’s collection and exhibition program for more than seventy years, and we are fortunate to have so many significant pieces from throughout Carr’s career,” said the Gallery’s Director Kathleen S. Bartels. “Into the Forest bracingly illuminates Carr’s lively forest paintings from the 1930s, which remain the most sustained and important depiction of the BC landscape in the first half of the 20th century.”

The Gallery’s Senior Curator—historical, Ian M. Thom, elaborates that “by confronting the forest directly, Carr celebrated the natural world through her masterful images of the coastal forest landscape. Through her unique synthesis of the spiritual and natural, Carr’s forest paintings have shaped the way British Columbian’s perceive their natural surroundings.”

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Ian Thom, Senior Curator-Historical