news, stories, views & events | In this new Emily Carr novel, more than a hundred years of history separate its two narrators―one of them a young lawyer in twenty-first-century New York, the other the famed early-twentieth-century artist Emily Carr―this magnetic new novel by bestselling author Leslie Howard offers a multigenrational story of love, ambition and creaking with convention. | | Doris Shadbolt and Emily Carr: A Legacy Discovered, Interpreted and Preserved | Doris Shadbolt occupies a distinctive place in the history of Emily Carr. She did not know Carr personally—Carr died in 1945, the same year Shadbolt moved to Vancouver—but over the next three decades Shadbolt became one of the people most responsible for shaping how Carr’s art was understood, exhibited and written about. | Beginning around 1932, Carr largely abandoned traditional watercolour for her field studies. Instead, she began using oil paint (and sometimes house paint) thinned with gasoline on manilla paper, creating a medium that combined the fluidity of watercolour with the rich colour and permanence of oil. This technique became central to many of her finest forest paintings of the 1930s. | After 22 years of living at Hill House (now called the House of All Sorts) on Simcoe Street, Emily tried to sell it. The depressed real estate market made it impossible. She ended up trading the house for a bungalow in Fairfield which she rented out for $25 a month and rented herself a cottage on Beckley Street in the working class neighbourhood in James Bay for $12 a month. The $13 difference was an important part of her income. After some tears and a difficult adjustment she began to paint again, sold some paintings and took on middle-aged sketching students to ease the financial strain. | The Move to Beckley Street in Her Own Words | Oh, I want to cry but I have no tears. Two drawers full of memories, words, letters, photos, tumbling out of old creased envelopes, faded faces, my own and others looking out from old photos. I did not know people were so dear, so kind. I have not been half grateful and now they are gone! What sweet, tender, kind little things are in those old yellow letters, things that my conceit took as my due, lightly, without thought. The two deep drawers of the writing table were stuffed with memories—dog registrations and photographs, exhibition catalogues, insurance policies, mortgage papers, Dede’s will. Father’s will, my will. | BC Archives Is On the Move to Colwood... | The relationship between Emily Carr and the BC Archives actually predates the building on Belleville Street by many decades. The provincial archives traces its origins to 1894, when librarian R.E. Gosnell began actively collecting records documenting British Columbia's early history. The Provincial Archives was formally established in 1908 and opened to the public in 1920. By 1970, its collections had outgrown the Provincial Library, and the Archives moved into its purpose-built facility at the corner of Belleville and Government streets. Now the BC Archives is on the move again. | Heffel Fine Auction House | Emily (2005) by Joe Fafard
bronze sculpture with patina
30 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 in
Sold by Heffel Auctions in 2022
estimated sale price $20,000 - $30,000 | | Joe Fafard never met Emily Carr—she died in 1945, three years after his birth—but he developed a strong artistic admiration for her and made her the subject of several sculptures. His interest seems to have been particularly connected to Carr’s love of animals, which paralleled his own lifelong fascination with animals, as well as her importance in Canadian art. Fafard began sculpting Carr in the early 2000s, producing versions that show her on horseback and others that include her beloved animals, including her dog Billie and monkey Woo. In 2005, Heffel Fine Art commissioned Emily Carr and Friends, an edition of seven bronzes showing Carr with her horse, Billie and Woo; three were installed outside Heffel locations in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. He also created a more intimate portrait of Carr in 2006, showing her with a small dog. Two Fafard sculptures of Carr are now held by Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and in 2012 he mounted an exhibition at Carr House in Victoria devoted to Carr and her menagerie. |
Value of Comic Sans (2016) by Sonny Assu
Abstract Digital Print on Archival Paper
Sale price $4,600
| | Sonny Assu, a Ligwiłda’xw artist of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations, developed his distinctive artistic practice through his studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where he earned his BFA in 2002. Raised in suburban North Delta, Assu did not fully discover his Kwakwaka’wakw heritage until he was eight, but during his twenties, while studying at Emily Carr, this discovery became a foundation of his artistic practice. He works across multiple media, bringing Kwakwaka’wakw artistic principles into dialogue with Western art and popular culture while exploring Indigenous identity, colonialism and contemporary Indigenous experience. Assu’s relationship with Emily Carr’s legacy became particularly significant in his Interventions on the Imaginary series, in which he digitally superimposes Northwest Coast Indigenous designs onto Carr’s paintings. By intervening in Carr’s landscapes, he creates a contemporary dialogue with her work and draws attention to Indigenous presence and histories that can be obscured by the colonial perspective of the original landscapes. His connection to Emily Carr continued when the university recognized his achievements with its Emily Award, a distinguished alumnus award, in 2006. His subsequent career has included major exhibitions, numerous awards and representation in public collections across Canada and internationally. | Centennial Exhibition 1971 | The Centennial Exhibition of Emily Carr was a particularly important exhibition in the history of Carr scholarship and in the Vancouver Art Gallery's presentation of her work. It was much more than a commemorative birthday exhibition: it helped establish the framework through which Carr was understood for the next several decades. The official title was Emily Carr: A Centennial Exhibition Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary of Her Birth. | Emily Carr and the Idea of Nature | Featuring more than 100 works, the largest Emily Carr exhibition in 20 years, explores in-depth the artist’s obsession with the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, using close analysis of her paintings and writings to investigate how she understood nature and her relationship to it. | Art Gallery of Greater Victoria | Reimagining the AGGV Collections | Co-curated by AGGV Chief Curator, Steven McNeil, the exhibition showcases the strengths of AGGV's permanent collections and includes seven paintings by Emily Carr: BC Forest, Juice of Life, Odds and Ends, Bly Sky, Sea and Sky, Hillside in France and Wild Lilies. All but Wild Lilies, painted in 1890, and Hillside in France, painted in 1911, were painted in 1930s. | Audain Art Museum in Whistler boasts the largest permanent exhibition of Emily Carr's paintings in the world. They rotate their impressive collection of 25 of her paintings so that no fewer than ten of them are on display at any one time. Their collection includes The Crazy Stair (1931), purchased in 2014 for $3.39-million, currently the most ever paid at auction for a Carr painting. | Emily Carr Chronicles Walking Tours | Discover the vibrant life and legacy of Victoria's most celebrated artist on this unforgettable 2-hour walking tour through historic James Bay, Victoria — the neighborhood where Emily Carr was born, lived, painted, wrote and was laid to rest. If you're a Emily Carr fan, love art, local history, or storytelling, this is a journey you won’t want to miss and also one you will always remember. | Friday, Oct 16 | 10 - Noon Friday, Oct 23 | 10 - Noon Friday, Oct 30 | 10 - Noon | Saturday, Oct 17 | 10 - Noon Saturday, Oct 24 | 10 - Noon Saturday, Oct 31 | 10 - Noon | | I am a James Bay resident who leads walks, talks, and tours celebrating Emily Carr and her lifelong connection to Victoria, where she was born, lived, worked, and is now remembered. I am a co-presenter of the annual 8 Remarkable Women Resting in Ross Bay Cemetery event held on International Women’s Day on March 8, where I present Carr’s stories at her gravesite and those of three other remarkable women artists also buried there. I also reserch, write, edits and publiseh the Emily Carr Chronicles website, blog, and this newsletter. Please forward this newsletter to an Emily Carr fan with my thanks. | | | | |
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