Sold for: $301,250

PROVENANCE
Dominion Gallery, Montreal
Kastel Gallery Inc., Montreal
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 24, 2005, lot 193
Private Collection, USA
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 163
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, Emily Carr, 1990, pages 163 and 167, the related 1930 charcoal drawing Untitled (landscape with “eye” in sky), collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, reproduced page 165

Emily Carr’s small sketchbook drawings of 1929 and 1930 formed the basis for a group of contemporaneous larger drawings that consolidated her ideas for canvases, such as the carefully worked charcoal precursor to this work, Untitled (landscape with “eye” in sky), dated 1930. Of these larger studio drawings, Doris Shadbolt wrote, “Whether her excited discovery of nature’s rich revelation of form possibilities simply impelled her into such fully developed statements or whether she needed to consolidate her ideas before taking them into her painting, they give us a revealing glimpse into her working method and her creative process.”

Carr made three last excursions to Indigenous areas on the outer coast of northwestern Vancouver Island: Nootka, Friendly Cove and Port Renfrew in 1929, and Quatsino Sound in 1930. At this time, she was alternating between images of landscape and Indigenous imagery. Doris Shadbolt noted that during this period, Carr “was still under the spell of the Indian presence and in several of these drawings she expressed the underlying correspondence that she had discovered between the natural environment and the Indian carvings in which eyes, or eyelike shapes, appear between totemlike sections of foliage.” The fascinating drawing Untitled (landscape with “eye” in sky) is evidence of Carr’s thoughtful consideration of her image. The imaginative inclusion of an abstracted eye motif, which looms out of the stormy sky over the landscape, shows that she was still "under the spell of" First Nations imagery. It implies the Indigenous view of the forces present in nature that they distilled in their totems, in the stylized eye of a thunderbird or raven.

In the dramatic Storm Over Grey Forest, we can see the evolution of this painting from the drawing. The storm, implied in the drawing, has broken over the land, descending like a waterfall. Where there was an eye in the drawing, there is now an abstracted aperture of light piercing through the tempest. The compression of the storm is made visible, the wind whipping the branches into wavelike formations, pushing them up at their tips. Light bursts out between sky and forest from the aperture, creating the sense of awe that one feels in the presence of such electrifying weather. Emerging from this wild motion are several cross-like trees, which act as vertical anchors. Slivers of bare canvas and white paint-strokes amongst the dark trees also let light into the density of the forest, as do mauve, brown and pink tones.

Much of Carr’s work in the 1930s was done using thinned oil paint on paper, which allowed a tremendous freedom of movement. Storm Over Grey Forest embodies that freedom in a rare and thrilling oil on canvas, in which her expressionistic brush-strokes captured the essence of the intangible – the storm’s energy, the vapour-laden air, and the sensation of intensity in the forest.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars