New Releases by Emily Carr

The story of Emily Carr and Lawren Harris is a story of personal growth and Canadian identity. Read about this artistic pair, then breathe life into these characters on stage.

Wild Flowers is a collection of Emily Carr''s delightfully evocative impressions of native flowers and shrubs. She wrote these short pieces later in life and they rekindled in her strong childhood memories and associations. She delights in the brightness of buttercups that let Spring''s secret out, muses over the hardiness of stonecrop (How any plant can grow on bare rock and be so fleshy leafed and fat is a marvel.) and declares that botanical science has un-skunked the skunk cabbage. Carr''s playful words often bring a smile to readers. About catnip, she writes: I did think it was kind of God to make a special flower for cats. In a brief Foreword and Afterword, archivist and historian Kathryn Bridge gives context to Wild Flowers within the body of Carr''s previously published writings. Wild Flowers is illustrated with beautiful watercolours of wild plants by Emily Henrietta Woods, one of Carr''s childhood drawing teachers in Victoria. The originals of Carr''s manuscript and Woods'' botanical illustrations reside in collections of the BC Archives; neither have been published until now. Woods'' paintings fit so well with Carr''s text. It''s serendipity that Woods taught Carr and that we have her art and Carr''s manuscript in the Archives'' collection, and that neither have been published before now. - Kathryn Bridge

Celebrate the Northwest with this beautiful, hardcover blank journal featuring an Emily Carr painting from The Pacific Northwest Landscape. Partial proceeds from the sale of this journal will benefit Northwest Bookfest, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring people together to celebrate the power of the written word and promote literacy.

Though fame came late to Emily Carr, today she is hailed as a major and influential figure in the history of Canadian art and as a writer of unique and extraordinary talent. In this book, Courtney Milne has taken the best of Carr''s writing about the land she loved and has matched it to a stunning selection of his own photographs of the West Coast. In a vigorous and colourful post-impressionist style, Emily Carr painted the vanishing native villages and totem poles of her beloved coastal British Columbia, and later in her career produced beautifully lyrical paintings expressive of the spirit and rhythms of Western forests, beaches, and skies. She also poured her talent into books about her life and art, her love of animals and nature, her frustrations and disappointments, her many sources of joy. An annual visitor to the West Coast, Courtney Milne has been making photographs with the words of Emily Carr in mind for close to 20 years. To put this book together he has collected his favourite quotes from Carr and combed through many thousands of his photographs to find the perfect image to match a chosen piece of prose. The result is a spellbinding duet of text and pictures from two gifted and sympathetic artists.

"Rather than an analytical history of the development of the school, the book provides a basic chronology for reference ... It focusses [sic] on the current movement ... as well as the influence of the place in which the school has evolved ... through the art works and through short texts on teaching, art culture ... The artists'' pages are works by artists and designers who attended the school and who are currently exhibiting and producing"--Page 166.

Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr celebrates the art and writing of a great artist who dedicated her life to portraying the powerful majesty of the coastal landscape, the lush rain forest and the monumental totem poles created by the native people of British Columbia. The 40 full-colour paintings chosen for this book from the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery are among Emily Carr''s most popular, and they are accompanied by short quotations from her writing. The introduction by Robin Laurence presents revealing insights into the life of this unconventional and gifted woman.

Catalogue of the post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr published by Mendel Art Gallery.

Thc Emily Carr Omnibus includes all her major published works. Here are her much-loved early stories, ranging for the gentle recollections of Klee Wyck and The Book of Small, to the acerbic The House of All Sorts, as well as the lesser-known Pause and The Heart of a Peacock. Here also are more personal works: Growing Pains, her autobiography, and her collected journals, Hundreds and Thousands.

This collection includes 150 letters Emily Carr wrote to her friends Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, and 100 other letters relating mainly to Emily Carr. The letters date from 1930 to 1945, the most prolific period in Carr''s career as both painter and writer. In them she writes in colourful detail about her everyday activities, and discusses her painting - "the biggest thing in my life." There are outbursts of exasperation and anger as well as many indications of her caring, her warmth, her wisdom and her wit, and of her impatience with critics and poseurs, and they give insights into her various relationships with, among others, Lawren Harris, Ira Dilworth, Jack Shadbolt, Garnett Sedgewick, Dorothy Livesay, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer. Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms shared Emily Carr''s interest in art. Carr''s relationship with Cheney dated back to 1930 but did not flourish until 1937 when Cheney moved from Ottawa to Vancouver to become the first full-time medical artist at UBC. Humphrey Toms was only twenty years old when he first met Emily Carr, having asked to visit her after seeing some of her paintings, following which a warm friendship developed. The correspondence between Cheney and Toms reveals how Carr was regarded at the time and attests to their mutual interest in the Vancouver art scene. As an active member Cheney relates gossip about the local art community, providing a very personal and often exceedingly critical view of the Vancouver art milieu of the time. Doreen Walker has chosen not to change the original text of the letters and includes Carr''s misspellings and grammatical irregularities, which give a feeling of immediacy to the writing. There are numerous examples of her talent for graphic description, how she felt "rag rug level" when depressed and how she "was sat down with a spank" when ill. Perhaps most significant are the many revelations of her deep commitment to her work and of her industry and perseverance despite her failing health. "Queer how we go on," she wrote to Cheney, "luck there is so much rubber in human composition."

Excerpts from Carr''s own writings combined with reproductions of over 200 works.