Vancouver Art Gallery (Emily Carr)

In November I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was particularly drawn to the exhbition of the work of Emily Carr, a Canadian artist orignally from Victoria, British Columbia. Carr was particularly interested in the native Canadian landscape and its communities. She painted trees in brilliant shades of green, blue and brown and would apparently sit for hours alone in the forest to commune with nature and to observe the light changing as it passed through the forest canopy. Carr developed within a modernist paradigm, having been influenced by European artists in the 1920s. Some of the work, like the one pictured here, shows her acute sense of colour, almost like Gaugin andDerain and certainly fauvist in style. What was particularly intriguing was her use of a visual ethnographic method. She spent time amongst the First Nation communities, observing their lifestyles and rituals, and documenting the symbols of their community and ancestery - the totem pole. Indeed, many pictures in this exhibition were of Carr's depictions of totem poles, which captured the sense of majesty, character and tradition. But in many cases they were set alongside portrayals of declining communities, or were simply the main theme, to the absence of other objects. The totem to Carr seemed to be a marker of a lost world and a tearful reminder of the histories of the past. Very inspiring.