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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Emily Carr

Image
Writing is a splendid sorter of... feelings, better even than paint.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
Emily Carr
Image
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.
Emily Carr
Image
Up came the sun, and drank the dew.
Emily Carr
Image
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!
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
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'.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
Inspiration is intention obeyed.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr
Image
Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.
Emily Carr
Image
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
Emily Carr
Image
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.
Emily Carr