PROVENANCE
Mrs. V. LaFontaine, Montreal
G. Blair Laing Limited, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 24, 2005, lot 138
Private Collection, United States
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 15, 2013, lot 163
Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr, 1979, a similar circa 1937 – 1940 canvas titled Sombreness Sunlit, in the collection of the BC Archives, reproduced page 131
Charles C. Hill, Johanne Lamoureux, Ian M. Thom et al., Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon, National Gallery of Canada, 2006, a similar circa 1938 canvas titled Forest, in the collection of Victoria University at the University of Toronto, reproduced page 232
Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr, 2006, pages 263 and 273
Roger Boulet, A Legacy of Canadian Art from Kelowna Collections, Kelowna Art Gallery, 2017, reproduced page 54

EXHIBITED
Kelowna Art Gallery, A Legacy of Canadian Art from Kelowna Collections, July 1 – October 15, 2017

Before 1933, for her sketching excursions into the woods around Victoria—to places such as Metchosin, Sooke, Cedar Hill and Goldstream Flats—Emily Carr relied on staying in cabins, summer cottages or even a derelict hunting lodge. In 1933, however, Carr transformed her practice by purchasing a caravan she named the Elephant. Outfitted with a bed, shelving, sleeping boxes for her dogs and monkey, an oil stove, and a canvas tarp for cooking, the Elephant became her mobile studio. Towed to diverse wooded and coastal locations around Victoria, it afforded her unprecedented freedom and a deeper, more immersive connection with nature.

Carr reveled in the sensory delights of her surroundings—the patter of rain on the roof, the rustling of wind through the trees, and the sweet scents of cedar and pine. She preferred painting in the spring and fall, finding that summer rendered the forest “too leafy” and crowded. In the spring of 1935, she stationed the Elephant at Albert Head; by September, she returned to the forest, where warm days, cool nights, dewy mornings and occasional fog set the stage for her creative process.

Once in the woods, Carr would select a quiet spot, set up her campstool and paints, and wait for the interplay of light, form and the forest’s vibrant energy to coalesce into an inspired composition. Employing an innovative technique—thinning oil paints with turpentine or gasoline—she captured her impressions with sweeping, expressive brush-strokes. Over time, she developed a distinctive visual vocabulary, using curves, rings and spirals to define the elements of her work. In British Columbia Forest, this is evident in the distinctive horizontal web of whitish strokes across the treetops and the short, deliberate marks on a central tree trunk that suggest broken-off branches. Similar techniques appear in other 1930s works, such as Sombreness Sunlit (in the collection of BC Archives) and Dancing Sunlit (in the McMichael Canadian Art Collection).

The foreground of British Columbia Forest—rendered with strong yet light brush-strokes—evokes the sensation of a rushing sea of undergrowth. In her journals, Carr wrote of her deep, almost mystical connection with the forest, describing it as “a robust grandeur, loud-voiced, springing richly from earth untilled, unpampered, bursting forth … an awful force greater in its stillness than the crashing, pounding sea.… It is life itself, strong, bursting life.”

In her quest to capture the forest’s pervasive energy, Carr’s expressionist brush-strokes dissolve form into dynamic movement and emotion. Although encouraged by Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris, who had shifted from representational landscapes to abstraction, Carr remained steadfast in her commitment to nature. While Harris embraced theosophy as a path towards abstraction, Carr’s Christian faith and her profound connection to the natural world led her to conclude that true artistic liberation lay not in abstraction, but in the sustained, nurturing power of nature itself.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars