Emily Carr
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.Collection: Art
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.Collection: Religion
Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.Collection: Nature
You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.Collection: Alone
Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.
You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.Collection: Practice
Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.Collection: Art
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.Collection: Patriotic
Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind...each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth. So artist, you too from the depths of your soul...let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.Collection: Spiritual
Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.Collection: Art
Inspiration is intention obeyed.Collection: Inspiration
The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.Collection: Rain
enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.Collection: God
real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.Collection: Art
So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.Collection: Silence
As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.Collection: Light
It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.Collection: Writing
What do I want to express? The subject means little. The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things.Collection: Mean
There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.Collection: Trying
I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.Collection: Going Out
Over and over one must ask oneself the queston, 'What do I want to express? What is the thought behind the saying? What is my ideal, what my objective? What? Why? Why? What?Collection: Want
Up came the sun, and drank the dew.Collection: Morning
There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact.... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.Collection: Writing
Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!Collection: Flower
There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.Collection: Real
Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.Collection: Two
Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn't always look the same.Collection: Art
The sun enriched the old poles grandly... The mothers expressed all womanhood - the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool.Collection: Mother
I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself.Collection: Self
The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.Collection: Beach
Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.Collection: Mistake
Oh, I wonder if I will ever feel the burst of birth-joy, that knowing that the indescribable, joyous thing that has wooed and wond me has passed through my life and produced one atom of the great reality.Collection: Reality
Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.Collection: Trying
My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!Collection: Determination
What a splendid time Woo must have had.Collection: Splendid
Don't take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it's you yourself that have made sure of it till it's yours absolutely by conviction. It's stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you'll fall into a hole.Collection: Fall
Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.Collection: Perfection
I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.Collection: Humility
Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint.Collection: Dog
The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven't they seen it every day since they were born? It's just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.Collection: Squares