Beloved Land

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

As she grew older, Emily Carr came to believe that “the old way of
seeing” could never express the vastness and the silences of
Canada’s wilderness land; it had to be “sensed and loved.” Her
unique way of seeing is caught here in her late paintings (produced
between 1928 and 1942).

Forty full-color reproductions from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s
collection are accompanied by short quotations from Carr’s writings
that add greatly to our understanding and appreciation of the artist and
her work. After meeting Lawren Harris in 1928, Carr wrote that his
“abstraction ideas” interested her tremendously but that she was not
yet willing to incorporate them into her own work. Nevertheless, in her
later work, she felt released from the need to be representational and
free to express her feelings through rhythmic portrayals of the West
Coast terrain.

Robin Laurence’s insightful 22-page introduction is both biographical
and critical. She finds Carr “spiky with contradictions,” a painter
who sublimated her erotic feelings in her art: “Her late landscape
paintings are charged with sexual forms and energies.”

Beloved Land is both an introduction to one of Canada’s best painters
and an advanced course in Carr’s later work.