Emily Carr was, without question, the most important artist working in British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr depicted the landscape of the province in a manner unlike any other artist. The richly forested terrain of southern BC, particularly that near her home in Victoria, became an important subject for her early in her career and provided artistic inspiration throughout her life. Early watercolour landscapes of the forests and later oils on both paper and canvas are amongst the most important of her works.

Some of Carr’s most eloquent paintings combine the coastal rain forest landscape with her other great interest, the totemic art of the First Nations people—the canvas Strangled by Growth (1931, collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery) is one of the finest examples of these two subjects being brought together. However, if one looks at the whole of Carr’s career, the forest landscape of her native British Columbia is the subject that dominates her artistic practice. Early watercolours such as Forest Scene (1909, collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria) depict the forest with a sensitivity and vision that no other artist working in the province could match.

Perhaps ironically for Carr, her emergence as an artist of national importance came with the presentation of her 1912 paintings of Northwest Coast First Nations totem poles in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern at the National Gallery of Canada in 1927. Indeed, at this important moment in her career, Carr had largely turned away from Indigenous subjects towards the forest landscape of BC. In 1928, Carr hosted the American artist Mark Tobey at her studio in Victoria. Carr and other artists such as Ina Uhthoff (1889 – 1971) worked with Tobey to intensify and refine their work. In the late twenties, Carr simplified her palette and turned her attention to the forest in an important series of charcoal drawings. These works developed into a new approach to the forest landscape, seen in the canvases of the following decade.

It is in forest landscapes such as Dancing Forest that Carr came closest to abstraction. The forms of these evergreens are greatly simplified but continue to reference the natural world. The masses of the trees have both a solidity and a dynamism that is striking. We are given a close-up view of thick, lush foliage and rocks that seems impenetrable, but if we give the image a little more attention, we can move into the dense landscape. Carr recognized the need for visual escape from this concentrated pattern of foliage and provides it with the patches of sky in the upper regions of the painting. It is, however, the forest that Carr wants the viewer to contemplate. As our focus turns to the massed forms of trees and rocks, we relish, with Carr, both the power and the beauty of the forest itself.

We thank Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator—Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay. Thom contributed to the major exhibition catalogue From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia and is author of Emily Carr Collected.

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