Posted
on December 13, 2014
A
Canadian icon was born today!
That's
what the Canadian Encyclopedia says, anyway.
Emily
Carr, born in Victoria, British Columbia, on this date in 1871, was
an artist and writer; she is best known for her paintings. A lot of
her work was inspired by aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest
Coast. But she also was inspired by the amazing landscapes of her
surroundings.
While
she was in her 20s, Carr made sketching and painting trips to
aboriginal villages of Canada and Alaska. She wanted to her her art
to document the artistic legacy of the people she met in those
villages.
Wanting
to learn even more about art, Carr went to France for a few years and
studied in one of the art academies. She was disturbed but intrigued
by the modernist painters she met there – especially by the use of
distortion and by the bright colors. When she returned home to
Canada, she began to use bright colors herself.
Carr
is considered important in Canadian art partly because she is one of
the first to have broken out of the just-a-realistic-landscape box.
Her work blended “natives and nurture” and Western forests in a
way that was uniquely her own.
What
is modern art?
 |
| An ad for a movie about Carr combines an image of her face superimposed on a picture of one of her beloved forests... |
We
consider Modern Art to be works produced roughly from the 1860s to
the 1970s, beginning with painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul
Gauguin and continuing with innovators such as Pablo Picasso. Modern
artists experimented with new ways of seeing, new ways of using
materials, new ways of thinking about the function of art.
Many
modern artists experimented with abstractions, but Carr said that she
“clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice.”
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