More quotes from Emily Carr’s journals:
Interesting quote on the life of a painting and her assertion that movement is required in a painting:
“Movement is the essence of being. When a thing stands still and says, “Finished,” then it dies. There isn’t such a thing as completion in this world, for that would mean Stop! Painting is a striving to express life. If there is no movement in the painting, then it is dead paint.”
It is interesting to speculate if Emily Carr married and ‘settled down” what it would have done to her painting career. She doesn’t speak of her love relationships except for in this quote:
“Oh to be thoroughly human, to love humanity more! I so wonder if that poor love I deliberately set-out to kill after it had overpowered me for fifteen years (and did kill) can ever sprout again. I think it was a bad, dreadful thing to do. I did it in self-defence because it was killing me, sapping the life from me. But love is too beautiful, too lovely a thing to murder and it musses one up. The spatter of love’s blood is upon one’s hands, red blood that congeals and turns black and will not wash off the cruel hands. It does not hurt the killed; it hurts the killer. Maybe if I had not killed love I would have had more intensity for the love side in my painting. Maybe I would have grown further and accumulated more in this life, or maybe it was one of the lessons I had to learn—how to manage my love. It’s no good pondering the maybes; too deep. Rather, better to open up all one can, grow, and know that the lesson was for my learning.”