Emily Carr

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) boasts of having “the largest and most significant collection” of Emily Carr paintings and drawings in Canada—ergo, the world. Not incidentally, visitors to the VAG will almost always encounter exhibitions drawn from that collection in the small galleries on the institution’s low-ceilinged fourth floor. At the VAG and elsewhere, solo shows of this enduringly iconic Canadian artist have tended to focus on her most familiar subject matter, the Indigenous art she admired and depicted from the early 1900s until roughly 1931 (with a late-life revisiting of Indigenous imagery in the early 1940s), and the West Coast rainforest, which she painted devotedly in the last 15 or so years of her working life. It hardly needs repeating that Carr’s depictions of Indigenous subjects and the settler beliefs that informed them came under critical re-evaluation a few decades ago, problematizing their representation in many Canadian institutions. For that matter, her depictions of the natural world as sublime and self-regenerating—even in the face of destructive mining and logging practices—have also been negatively evaluated within the context of post-colonial theory.

Given all that has gone before, the question emerges: How to shape our experience of Carr’s art in the year 2025? In advance of a major, internationally touring exhibition of her work planned for a few years hence, Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the VAG, has provided us with an unexpected formalist approach. After all, he reasons, Carr was a modernist artist, so why not analyze and interpret her art through a modernist lens? More precisely, he has chosen to examine her paintings of forest interiors through her “spatial metaphors,” such as the ways in which she handles the “opening and closing off of space.” Leading a media tour through this small show, Hill confessed to having been both excited and intimidated by the VAG’s immense collection of Carr’s paintings and drawings. Over the three and a half years since his arrival at the VAG, he told us, he has let her work percolate at the back of his mind. What has emerged is a visually engaging and thoughtfully executed exhibition focused on one particular period of Carr’s oeuvre.

On entering the show, the viewer is immediately struck by the installation of works on the gallery’s south wall. Here, Carr’s forest paintings butt up against each other in two densely packed horizontal rows. This is not a floor-to-ceiling salon hang; rather, it is a thematically concentrated and formally reiterative hang, emphasizing what Hill has identified as Carr’s “impenetrable landscape.” For reasons that I am still struggling to understand, I found this arrangement of 17 paintings striking and exciting. It provoked a “Wow!” reaction in me that seemed and still seems larger than a studied concentration of formal elements, recurring motifs and technical strategies might elicit.

Hill argues that while Carr herself wrote that the viewer’s eye should ideally move through the imagined space of a landscape painting, her depictions of the West Coast rainforest “confound” or rebuff such movement. And, yes, in most of the paintings of deep woods that are massed here, viewers are brought smack up against a wall of dense foliage rather than being transported into an illusionistic depth of field. Most of these works were executed during a transitional period between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. (This transition occurred after both Lawren Harris and Mark Tobey advised Carr to set aside her Indigenous subjects and focus on the natural world.) They typically possess little or no visible horizon line and, counter to Canadian landscape painting tradition, are mostly formatted vertically rather than horizontally.

The upper row of paintings is unified by repeated formal elements, whether wavy masses of foliage that are plotted horizontally across the picture plane, as seen in Deep Forest, c. 1931, or upright conical forms of individual trees, as exemplified by A Young Tree, 1931. Carr’s sculptural approach to her arboreal subjects seems to arise from both the residual power of her Indigenous imagery—her depictions of memorial poles, house posts, welcome figures and other Indigenous carvings—and the influence, again, of Harris and Tobey. (Carr historian Doris Shadbolt also cites the impact of a book by Ralph M Pearson, How to See Modern Pictures.) As installed here, the forest functions as a kind of heavy green curtain that runs across the front of a stage—again, blocking our entry rather than summoning the eye into space. However, in a couple of works, such as Mountain Forest, 1935–36, a sense of pictorial depth is achieved with the depiction of trees receding up a mountainside towards slight, patchy openings into light-filled sky.

The forest landscapes concentrated here are inflected by two depictions of Indigenous subjects, the first being Old Time Coast Village, 1929–30, in which a horizontal line of ghostly white longhouses is exaggeratedly dwarfed by evergreen forest. Again, there is a likeness to a theatrical set, although in this particular work, the structures at centre stage seem in danger of being entirely engulfed by the thick, heavy, light-excluding drapery behind and above them. The “spatial metaphor” appears to be of a culture at risk of disappearing into the natural world and expresses a prevailing and mistaken belief in the “vanishing Indian.” This is a belief to which Carr subscribed and which, in fact, motivated her to dedicate herself to recording Indigenous carvings in her art from her early encounters with them in 1907.

The lower row of paintings finds formal coherence in the dominant verticals of reddish-brown tree trunks, including the plainly titled and strikingly phallic Tree Trunk, 1931, its smooth, fleshy, up-thrusting form enwrapped in labial folds of foliage. (Much has and has not been written about this work …) Also included here is Totem and Forest, 1931, a meticulously detailed depiction of a pole Carr sketched on Haida Gwaii, its pale, centrally placed form backgrounded by dense, stylized layers of deep green foliage. The foliage itself is punctured by oddly mouth-like openings into foreboding darkness while the pole echoes the individual tree trunks in neighbouring paintings. Underscoring the imagery here is an idealized Romantic view—discussed in a nearby didactic panel—of Indigenous peoples and cultures untainted by Western “civilization” and integrated within the natural world.

The two paintings hanging on the gallery’s west wall, Strangled by Growth, 1931, and Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1931, are intended to remind us of the ways in which Carr’s paintings reveal aspects of her “fraught” and self-mythologizing relationship to the Indigenous peoples and cultures of the Northwest Coast. They also reveal the ways in which, as discussed, Carr embraced both the 18th-century Rousseauian idea of the “noble savage” and the 19th-century colonialist propaganda of the “vanishing Indian.” These beliefs are cited in the accompanying text panel, which deconstructs both paintings by marrying spatial metaphors to postmodern and postcolonial theory.

As for Carr’s impenetrable landscape, well, she quickly moved beyond it, progressing from static, smoothly rendered sculptural forms and dark, closed-off spaces to more open and painterly scenes in which there is an abundance of movement, light and expressive brush strokes. Probably the most famous of such works is Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, a painting that hangs by itself in the exhibition on the gallery’s north wall. Here, a hyperbolically tall, bare and spindly tree trunk, crowned by a small, sketchy wedge of foliage, reaches upward from a low, logged-off landscape into a huge, ecstatically pulsing and light-filled sky.

Carr created this painting at a time when she had explored and rejected Harris’s theosophical beliefs and returned to the Christianity of her Victorian childhood (albeit a Christianity still influenced by transcendentalism). In Scorned as Timber, her inclination to anthropomorphize trees is manifested as outright deification. Add the two small, faint echoes of the central tree—two other tall, spindly, bare tree trunks with scarcely there, cross-like dashes of foliage, receding into the distance—and it seems evident to me that this is a crucifixion scene, and the clear-cut hill that Carr probably first sketched in the Langford area, just outside of Victoria, represents Calvary, the hill known in Christian tradition as “the place of the skull,” just outside Jerusalem.

None of this is discussed in the show. In fact, I can’t find it discussed anywhere. I posit it as my own interpretation of a much-reproduced painting that I have been looking at for years. It is an odd but somehow compelling coincidence that I am writing this review over the Easter weekend. I am not a practising Christian but like most students of Western art history, I have viewed my share of crucifixion paintings. What I admire here is how Carr has so successfully expressed—through, yes, the spatial metaphors and compositional elements of landscape painting—what Doris Shadbolt has described as an ecstatic identification with “all of creation.” Scorned as Timber is a wondrous finale to this small and interesting show—a dazzling repudiation of all that dark and static impenetrability that came before it. ❚

“Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape” is exhibiting at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, from January 25, 2025, to January 4, 2026.

Robin Laurence is an award-winning writer, critic and curator based in Vancouver.