Living in a world of movement and change

“Sunshine and Tumult.” The title of this Emily Carr painting is surely an expression of what we’re all experiencing right now. From extremes of weather — blazing sun for weeks on end, broken by storms with winds and rains that leave us in awe — to the tumult of emotions that accompany each day of pandemic life. The swirling blues of the sky and greens of the majestic trees suggest movement and change.

In the late years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th, Carr travelled throughout British Columbia, where she witnessed the disappearing First Nations and a landscape being wrought by logging and western commerce. It was a time when Canada as a country was deciding what it wanted to be.

She studied in California, in France and in England, where she was encouraged to paint “en plein air,” the idea being the artist gains an immediacy and intensity of experience that allows them to capture, for example, the nuances of changing light.

Carr took the tools of creation, her paints, brushes and easel, outdoors.

She painted this particular piece in 1939, one of many great works realized in the later part of her career, after a long period of creative drought. In 1913, discouraged by her lack of acceptance in the Canadian art world, she turned to the business of running a boarding house along with other pursuits until, in 1927, some of her pieces were exhibited at this country’s National Gallery — there she met the Group of Seven and was famously told “you are one of us.”

In this later creative period, she also began using a new medium. Wrote Lisa Baldissera, author of “Emily Carr: Life & Work,” “She worked on paper and used gasoline to thin her oil paints, which resulted in a viscosity and density that still retained the ease of watercolour during her excursions.”

Now that the weather is better and we are spending more time en plein air, we are experiencing a more immediate and intense relationship with the world around us.

Like Carr, we are living in a world of movement and change, together creating as a country, community and individuals, a new way forward.