At the same time that the art of the Group of Seven was gaining popularity, Emily Carr was struggling to make a career for herself on the Canadian west coast. In some ways, Carr's art was very similar to the art of the Group of Seven and she eventually became close friends with Lawren Harris and other prominent Canadian nationalists of the day, who treated her as a kindred spirit. But, Carr's art and vision of Canada have also been called unique. Her family background, the region of the country in which she painted, the subjects she chose to paint, and her own ideas about Canada and Canadian art combined to produced a vision of the Canadian west coast which remains popular today. This vision and the art it led Carr to create distinguishes her as the best-know woman artist in Canadian history.

Carr was born in Victoria, BC, on 13 December 1881. She died there in 1945. By the time of her death, she had become a well-recognized west coast artist and award-winning author whose fame has continued to increase. Carr was not always this well-known. Her struggle to make a place for herself in the world of Canadian art was long and, at times, frustrating. Carr was born into a middle-class, sternly religious family. She was a vivacious child who loved the wilderness, but who also upset her family by behaving in ways which were, at the time, considered inappropriate for young women. She began to take drawing lessons at the age of nine and by her teens had decided to become an artist. When her parents died, she left Victoria to study art in San Francisco, returned to British Columbia in 1893, and then travelled to London and Paris to continue her education.

When she first started her career in the early 1900s, Carr's paintings were well-received by local critics in Vancouver and Victoria, but she found it difficult to make a living. The unwillingness of the local population to purchase her paintings upset Carr at the time and remained a matter of concern for her throughout her life. To support herself, Carr taught children's art classes, drew cartoons for newspapers, made tourist souvenirs, and ran a boarding house. It was not until 1927 that Carr began to receive some recognition for her artwork.

Carr's big break came when Marius Barbeau, the anthropologist, friend, and supporter of the Group of Seven, was in British Columbia to study First Nations cultures. Carr had sketched in several of the northern British Columbia towns where Barbeau was working and through mutual friends they met. Barbeau who was impressed with Carr's paintings, contacted his close friend Eric Brown, the director of the NGC, and urged him to put Carr's work in a major exhibition in conjunction with the Group of Seven in Toronto. Brown agreed and Carr's work was shipped east for her first major show outside of British Columbia.

This exhibition was a turning point for Carr. It promoted her career in two important ways. First, her work was very well received and she found herself on the way to establishing a national reputation as a leading artistic figure in Canada. Second, Carr met some of the members of the Group of Seven when she, herself, travelled east for the show. Carr liked what she saw of the Group's art, and was particularly taken with Lawren Harris's paintings. "Oh, God," she wrote in her diary after meeting the Group of Seven and seeing their work, "what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world." After this 1927 exhibition, Carr returned to BC determined t pursue her art.

It is difficult to pick a single painting which best represents Carr's art because her painting style changed over the years. Two paintings which illustrate the changing patterns of Carr's art are Totem Forest and Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky. Like the Group of Seven, she was interested in landscapes, but she was also interested in painting the aboriginal cultures of British Columbia. This interest in Canadian First Nations developed early in Carr's life. In 1898, she made a sketching trip to a Native reserve on the west side of Vancouver Island and periodically painted scenes of Native life after that. She was particularly fond of painting Native villages and totems. This interest can be seen in Totem Forest in which Carr depicts a series of totem poles. The style of this painting is similar to that of the Group of Seven. It is an interpretive work guided as much by Carr's vision of an ideal totem forest as by an effort to realistically portray this scene. The green colouring of the hillside is brightened by the fading sun which seems to highlight the totem poles in the foreground and draws the viewers attention to them. The scene is presented in a bold manner as Carr is trying to capture what she feels is the spirit -- as opposed to simply the physical reality -- of the scene.

Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky was painted in 1935, several years after Totem Forest. It contains many of the same elements as Totem Forest, but differs in some significant ways. In Totem Forest Carr used nature as a background to highlight the totems which were the main subject of the painting. In this painting the focus is more directly on nature. Carr has depicted a tree which loggers have passed over because they felt it would not make good timber. The tree, in other words, is allowed to stand because it has no commercial value. For Carr, however, the tree is important for reasons which are not commercial. If the tree is of no value to people, it is beloved of the sky, a force above and beyond the control of human beings. In this painting, Carr's brush strokes are more fluid than in Totem Forest. In Totem Forest, the different colours Carr used stand out as distinct parts of the painting, but in Scorned as Timber the different elements of the scene and the different colours she has used to paint it seem to flow together. The flowing character of this painting seems to suggest that Carr is awed by the majesty, fluidity, and dynamism of nature. Here she seems to be saying that the value of nature lies not in the money that it can make, but in this beauty and majesty.

Today, Carr's art remains popular. Many galleries and museum have collected her work and it can be seen on display in many parts of Canada and over the World Wide Web. In recent years, however, Carr's work has become controversial. Where once Carr's art was generally applauded, some art critics have begun to question the ways in which she chose to portray Native people. Her paintings of decayed Native totems and villages, for example, have been criticized because they seems to suggest that Native cultures themselves were in a state of decay. Though it might seem easy to dismiss such criticism of Carr, it is a plausible interpretation of her art. At the least, it is important to note that a popular artistic vision of Canada could present Native peoples only as a relic of the past. This conception of First Nations was challenged after Carr's death by artists like Bill Reid, a Haida carver who made an important contribution to what has been called the renaissance (rebirth) of Haida art in contemporary Canada. Reid's art drew heavily on his Haida heritage in order to present a vision of the country which included a vibrant and developing Native culture.