Quote

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.

Emily Carr

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Emily Carr
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: December 13
Died: 1945
Died: March 2
Artist
Autobiographer
Painter
Writer
M. Emily Carr
Emily M. Carr
Klee Wyck
Particular
Totems
Honest
Detail
Lines
Attached
True
Proportion
Must
Details
Every
Absolutely
Meaning
Totem
Line
Depicting

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So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
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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.
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Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest.
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Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.
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The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.
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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.
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Up came the sun, and drank the dew.
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Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.
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What a splendid time Woo must have had.
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When you really think about your hand you begin to realize its connection, to sense the hum of your own being passing through it. When we look at a piece of the universe we should feel the same.
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I wonder why we are always sort of ashamed of our best parts and try to hide them. We don't mind ridicule of our 'sillinesses' but of our 'sobers'.
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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.
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There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
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Writing is a splendid sorter of... feelings, better even than paint.
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Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.
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