More quotes from Emily Carr’s journals:
Emily Carr must have had a strong fire within not only to paint, being a female artist, but also to paint the way she did in the time she lived. This comment speaks to the sensitivity we have towards our own work and the turmoil you feel in presenting to the public:
I wonder why being confronted with my work in the face of the public always embarrasses and reproaches me so terribly. Is it because there is dishonesty or lack of sincerity in the work, something that doesn’t ring true, a lack of integrity in my presentation of the subject, or is it a sort of reaction arising from the perpetual snubbing of my work in my younger days, the days after I went away and had broken loose from the old photographic, pretty-picture work? Gee whiz, how those snubs and titters hurt in those days! I don’t care half so much now, and yet those old scars are still tender after all these years.”
I think this quote speaks to the constant searching/ longing of the painter, and also of the constant changing of the patterns and colours within a landscape scheme:
“”Still Midnight” -“This is thine hour, O soul, thy free flight into the wordless” – sang in my heart. I’ve a notion, imagination perhaps, that if you are slightly off focus, you vision the spiritual a little clearer. Perhaps it is that one is striving for something a bit beyond one’s reach, an illusive something that can scarcely bear human handling, that the “material we” scarcely dare touch. It is too bright and vague to look straight at; the brutality of a direct look drives it away half imagined, half seen. It is something that lies, as Whitman says, in that far off inaccessible region, where neither ground is for the feet nor path to follow.”