Provenance

Roberts Gallery, Toronto

Warwick Gallery, Vancouver

Private collection, Calgary

Masters Gallery, Calgary

Private collection, Edmonton

Exhibited

Emily Carr Retrospective, Masters Gallery, Calgary, Mar. 13 – 20, 2013

It was around the years 1928 to 1930, after Carr’s exposure to the Group of Seven and especially Lawren Harris, that she began to find a form of her own. Carr’s painting in that period was in an entirely new and astonishingly fully formed style marked by a conviction and personal authority.

Lawren Harris was the inspiration for Carr’s depiction of the massive sculptural stylization of natural forms. Through Harris, Carr first became to be aware of transcendentalism as a goal for her art. The shift in Carr’s subject matter to the forest itself was influenced by Harris, but also by Carr’s appreciation of the deep woods as a more comprehensive world of creation. Carr was led by her reverence to explore light in its primary symbolic role as consciously dark-dispelling and life-creating. In Grey Trees c.1930 Carr’s penetrating vision of the archaic timeless forest is presented as a poetic metaphor of dynamic silence.