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`Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky': Emily Carr's double approach to First Nations Canadian landscapes and images in her painting and writing [1]
ABSTRACT Emily Carr (1871 1945) is now known as both a visual artist and a writer of some import. Wet while Carr's work was not exactly `scorned', it was certainly underestimated, both as art and as writing, in her own time and for generations to follow. Accounts of the woman in her day tended to depict her as eccentric, while accounts of her work tended to refer to her as a 'woman artist' (as distinct from the generic male `artist) or as a Western Canadian artist (still `other', this time in relation to the 'modern' identified primarily with European artists and some art of the USA). But Carr's work bears scrutiny, not just in these specialist terms. The paintings are remarkable in their distinctive style as well as their historical and ethnographic interest as depictions of First Nations Canadian landscapes and images; the writings--and especially the stories, which fall somewhere between autobiography and fiction-shed light on the paintings, and on the cultural conditions of their making. Although Carr's relationship with the indigenous peoples of Western Canada has raised some problematic issues of appropriation for a few, it is nevertheless argued here that Carr rejected the explicitly 'colonial' attitudes associated with material and patriarchal appropriation of lands, stories, and images, by positioning herself between cultures, as a self-conscious 'outsider' to both. Her work (art and writing) can be re-examined by the insights of recent feminist and postcolonial theories.
Looking at Emily Carr: gender, culture, art and writing
Emily Carr is now gaining recognition as one of Canada's finest artists and writers, yet her work is still relatively little known. From the 1890s until her death in 1945, she lived and worked largely on her own, but often within the boundaries of First Nations settlements, so that she might find a freedom of creation and expression and come to some greater understanding of the people and images she represented in her art. With the First Nations peoples of British Columbia, she found a space-physical, psychic, artistic, political-in which she could paint and write freely, a space which her late Victorian (post)colonial...