Quote

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.

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
Thing
Paint
Trying
Except
Way
Bigger
Smattering
Meaning
Dishonestly
Painting
Bluffing
Getting
Representation
Wrong
Honestly
Right
Surface

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Writing is a splendid sorter of... feelings, better even than paint.
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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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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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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.
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Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.
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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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Let me not fuss and fret at my incompetence but be still and know that Thou art God.
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So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
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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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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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Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.
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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.
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Inspiration is intention obeyed.
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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.
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If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good,--or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.
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Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.
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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.
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The house begins to be a home. The unfamiliar places are beginning to fold the familiar objects into their keeping and to cozy them down. Objects that swore at each other when the movers heaved them into the new rooms have subsided into corners and sit to lick their feet and wash their faces like cats accepting a new home.
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The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
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Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.
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