Emily Carr*

Adapted from:
"Emily Carr". CBC Times.
February 10-16, 1962.

"The Heart of the Thing", on CBC television, Feb. 11, 4:30 p.m., the paintings and writing of Emily Carr.

She was a unique talent. Although some of Emily Carr's work showed the influence of the Canadian School, she produced paintings that in themselves were original and illuminating.

Emily Carr's first paintings of B.C. Indians, their villages, their totem poles, the forest and the seas, are those of a documentor.

"I was as Canadian born as the Indian", she wrote, "but my old world heredity pulled me back." She abandoned painting for some fifteen years. When she returned to the easel, she found her style had undergone a subtle change. But so had her subjects. The totem poles were being engulfed by the forests; from many areas the Indian had disappeared -- and so did he in her paintings -- and as she later said, "the Indian had lost faith in his totem; now he was carving to please the tourist." Her style became fierce, powerful, and by the time she was seventy she had come to terms with her bitter knowledge of the destruction of the ancient Indian culture, of the past, and her hand recognized its surety in marking the metamorphosis. Then to her powerful new approach, a new buoyancy was added. Her hemmed-in forest gave way to soaring trees rising from open clearings.

She died in Victoria, B.C., in March, 1945. Throughout her life, writing, too, had been an adjunct to her creative expression. Excerpts from her writing, read by Joy Coghill, a special musical score composed by Leonard Wilson, together with more than 60 of her paintings and the original scenes where they were executed, are all included in the program. Narration is by Art Hives, script by Peter Haworth and photography by John Seale.

© Courtesy of the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION.

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