Few have written so evocatively on their relationship with the woods and trees as Emily Carr, once describing the forest as “Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.”
Here’s a grab-bag of other things she had to say:
“Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain.”
“I want the ferocious, strangled lonesomeness of that place, creepy, nervy, forsaken… and the great dense forest behind full of unseen things and great silence, and on the sea the sun beating down… “
“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.”
“Bless… the two painting masters who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.”
“Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light – sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green – sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.”
and
“So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.”
Break-a-Brush!
David
-- "Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises." Emily Carr