"A painting from 1931, Strangled by Growth, shows a carved face peering out of that swirling mass of greenery that is half garment and half light waves that have somehow become solid. The painting is very still and yet at the same time bursting with life.
All of these elements-the tree when it was growing, the carver who cut into the wood, the history and the myths and the people who once lived here-are in the painting. All of them and more: the slow invisible growth, the particles of dust, and the insects drifting in the shafts of sunlight, all are alive in some big way that she senses but cannot put into words. there is a force that pulses through everything. She feels it in her veins, in the beating of her heart, in the slow turning of the earth and in the invisible stars in the sky. Not even the word "god" is big enough to encompass what she feels.
How to tell it? How to say it? How to touch it and show it? Emily speaks in the only way she can, with her brush. She dips it into the dabs of paint and her palette and makes a mark on the canvas-a gentle, rhythmic curve of green, a shape and a form and feeling. There it is. And now, here is the great stillness on the edge of nowhere, she makes something for eternity."
Strangled by Growth, Emily Carr
"Emily Carr, The painter, immersed herself totally in her own experience and created something that is partly the forest, partly herself, but mostly something else entirely."
"It does not matter if she was an innovator or an original; what matters is that she makes something true."
