Emily Carr: The Art of Picture Construction

Source:
Hundred and Thousands: pg 95
Douglas & McIntyre
Vancouver, Toronto, Berkley. 2006


I am painting a flat landscape, low lying hills with an expanding sky. What am I after, crush and exaltation? It is not a landscape and not a sky but something outside and beyond the enclosed forms. I grasp for a place and a thing one cannot see with these eyes, only very, very faintly, with one's higher eyes.
I begin to see that everything is perfectly balanced so that what one borrows, one must pay back in some form or another that everything has its own place, and is interdependent on the rest, that a picture, like life, must also have perfect balance. Every part of it is also dependent on the whole and the whole is dependent on every part. It is a swinging rhythmn of thought, swaying back and forth, leading up to, suggesting, waiting, urging, the unworded statement to come forth and proclaim itself, voicing the notes from its very soul to be caught up and echoed by other souls, filling space and at the other time, leaving space, shouting but silent. Oh, to be still enough to hear and see and know the glory of the sky and earth and sea.