Emily Carr 1871 - 1945

Dominion Gallery, Montreal

Collection of E.R. Hunter, West Palm Beach, Florida

Six Canadian Painters, Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, January, 1948, travelling to Clearwater, Florida and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, exhibited under the title Spring in the Woods, cat. no. 1

Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr, Toronto, 1966, p. 193

Christopher Varley, Emily Carr, Oil on Paper Sketches, Edmonton Art Gallery, 1979, p. 2

This painting is in excellent condition with no apparent issues under UV. There is a small fleck of surface dirt on the far left tree trunk.
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In 1934, Carr decided that by using the oil on paper technique she had devised primarily to speed up and to give more spontaneity to her outdoor sketching, she could both discover and capture more genuine emotion than she could in the canvases done later in her studio. And so the works on paper came to be the welcome and superior substitute for the canvases.

When she started to create and use this new 'calligraphy', her work became uninhibited, expressive, loose, lyrical and full or great sweeping rhythms.

Carr remarked:

Sketching in the big woods is wonderful. Up I go, find a space wide enough to sit in and clear enough so that the undergrowth is not drowning you...Wait...Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out your eye passes. Nothing is crowded: there is living space for all. Air moves between each leaf. Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive. The air is alive. The silence is full of sound. The green is full of colour. Light and dark chase each other. Here is a picture, a complete thought, and there another and there...

These oil on paper sketches were the last great body of art by this exceptional artist. As Varley notes:

The oil on paper sketches represent the fulfillment of Emily Carr's promise. They are more audacious and varied than her canvases and, as a result, tell us much more of her interests and ambitions.