PHOTO ESSAY

Regarding Emily

Taking a fresh look at Emily Carr

By Rachel Giese
June 6, 2006

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Courtesy National Gallery of Canada.

Strangled by Growth (1931)
oil on canvas, 64 × 48.6 cm

Not only has Carr’s life inspired plays, novels, biographies and academic studies, the artist herself was a prolific writer of essays and journals. Her diaries, published posthumously in 1966 as Hundreds and Thousands, offer fascinating insight into her creative process. While painting this canvas, an image from a Koskemo village, she wrote in her journal, “I want the pole vague and the tangle of growth strenuous. I want the ferocious, strangled lonesomeness of that place, creepy, nervy, forsaken, dank, dirty dilapidated, the rank smell of nettles and rotting wood, the lush greens of the rank sea grass and the overgrown bushes, and the great dense forest behind full of unseen things and great silence …”