Emily Carr Quotes (21 Quotes)

The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.

There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

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.

Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

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.

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.

You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

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.

Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind... each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth... So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul... let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.

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

There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.

How badly I want that nameless thing First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.

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.

Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.

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.