Emily Carr

Emily Carr (1871–1945) is an iconic figure in the history of Canadian art, an early pioneer of the distinctive “West Coast modernism” that was later realized in the work of British Columbia artists such as Jack Shadbolt and B.C. Binning. She received early artistic training in Paris amid the abstractionist ferment of the 1910s. Upon her return to Canada, she became affiliated with members of the Group of Seven, who shared with her notions that the Canadian “wilderness” could best be represented through a modern visual language. Carr was tireless in her depiction of the BC landscape in which she lived, and was an outspoken critic of its increasing exploitation by burgeoning capitalism. She wrote extensively about the devastation of the natural world, and nascent “environmentalism” registers in her many renderings of trees, forests and logged hillsides.