Emily Carr Quotes
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.
Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.
I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.
As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.
It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.
Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!
I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
When you really think about your hand you begin to realize its connection, to sense the hum of your own being passing through it. When we look at a piece of the universe we should feel the same.
If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good,--or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.
I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers'.
Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.
Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.
There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact.... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.
I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.
Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same.
Over and over one must ask oneself the queston, 'What do I want to express? What is the thought behind the saying? What is my ideal, what my objective? What? Why? Why? What?
There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.
Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?
My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!
Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.
Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.
Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.
The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven't they seen it every day since they were born? It's just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.
