Emily Carr,and the pantheist movement in modern art

back to VISA 3720 course outline

Mankind is always searching for a universal "truth". Religion often becomes a path to that truth. Spirituality becomes a factor in dealing with the mystery of our past, especially our unrecorded past. We know that rituals occurred with our ancestors from the artifacts we've found, but we have only enough information to determine that they did occur, not why necessarily, or how. So legends are created, myths are born. Picasso studied the monolithic sculptures of his Iberian peninsula's past, as well as primitive African masks, and out of this came his "Madamoiselles d'Avignon". Paul Gaugin traveled to Tahiti and painted the "primitive" people that he saw there. In his art he stripped away the world and showed them as a new, clean, innocent kind of humanity, adding a spiritual quality to their lives in paint. Emily saw the mystic attraction in the local native totem poles and villages that she visited and wrote about and painted. The difference with her was that she did not accompany, or influence, or become influenced by other artists in her daily work. Hers was a lonely path. Other than her visits from Lawren Harris or J.E.H. McDonald, and one or two native artists she was quite alone in her development.