VANCOUVER.- The Vancouver Art Gallery launched a new year-long exhibition about one of the most significant artists in Canada’s history, Emily Carr (1871–1945). Featuring more than 20 of Carr’s signature forest paintings, Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape recognizes the natural world as one of Carr’s lifelong inspirations, taking as its subject the experience of imaginatively entering the space of the forests that she painted. Visitors will encounter a densely hung group of paintings of thick forest scenes faced off on the opposite wall by a single Carr painting of a clear-cut landscape with an open horizon. The exhibition deliberately draws out the physical experience of the opening and closing-off of space in Carr’s forest scenes.


Explore the majestic forests and vibrant culture of British Columbia through the art of Emily Carr. Click here to discover books on Amazon showcasing her iconic paintings and delve into her remarkable life and artistic journey.


“Emily Carr’s forest paintings profoundly shaped the way British Columbians perceive their surroundings to this day,” says Anthony Kiendl, CEO & Executive Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “We are honoured to celebrate Carr’s enduring legacy, the Emily Carr Trust and our commitment to showcasing Canadian art.”

Carr captured the coastal forest landscape in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art. Driven by a Romantic desire for a spiritual union with nature, she was able to combine her knowledge of avant-garde Modernism from her studies in Europe with a deep engagement with the rainforests of BC’s West Coast to create a unique and powerful vision.

Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes his inspiration for the exhibition: “From my earliest encounters with Carr’s paintings I was struck by the density of her forests; not only the thickness of the growth, but the way she paints it. In her later works she stylizes trees and bushes into massed, solid volumes, often closing off space—or at least making it challenging to project yourself into the space of the painting. Recently, I wondered what her treatment of space might tell us about her aspiration to connect with nature. It seemed to me that spatially the paintings both promise and resist that impulse.”

When writing about her landscape paintings, Carr would sometimes describe how an eye might move through the imagined space in the work. Of travelling to Ontario to meet artist Lawren Harris she wrote: “As I came through the mountains, I longed to cast off my earthly body and float away through the great pure spaces between the peaks, up the quiet green ravines into the high, pure, clean air. Mr. Harris has painted those very spaces, and my spirit seems able to leave my body and roam among them.”

It is striking, then, that so many of Carr’s paintings create an experience of dense, impenetrable forest that confounds such forward movement. In many cases, the viewer is tantalized with the opportunity of communion with a carefully observed natural environment, while simultaneously foiled at the prospect of imaginatively entering its depths. In its exhibition design, Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape looks specifically at space as a metaphor, particularly as experienced in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest that surround Vancouver and dominate BC’s coastal landscape. Ironically, many of her spatially open works are open precisely because they depict landscapes that had been recently subject to clear-cut logging.

All landscape paintings are the product of an artist’s encounter with an observable reality that is then processed through the assumptions and choices they make in selecting and depicting what they have seen. In Carr’s case, she was both a careful observer—anyone who has spent time in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest will have encountered dense walls of trees and undergrowth—and someone primed by a tradition going back to eighteenth-century Romanticism to seek spiritual transcendence in communion with nature.

The title of the exhibition suggests the paradox arising from a desire to navigate that which is impenetrable. It reflects the tension in Carr’s paintings between the passionate wish for union with nature and the challenge posed to an artist hoping to render that experience through the mediation of paint on canvas; in other words, as a form of visual culture.


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