Emily Carr Quotes

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.

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 depths of your soul...let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.

Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.

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

Inspiration is intention obeyed.

The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.

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.

real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.

enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.

So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

As the woods are the same, the trees standing in their places, the rocks and the earth... they are always different too, as lights and shadows and seasons and moods pass through them.

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.

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

There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.

Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.

Up came the sun, and drank the dew.

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

What do I want to express? The subject means little. The arrangement, the design, colour, shape, depth, light, space, mood, movement, balance, not one or all of these fills the bill. There is something additional, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things.

Over and over one must ask oneself the queston, 'What do I want to express? What is the thought behind the saying? What is my ideal, what my objective? What? Why? Why? What?

Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!

The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.