While artist Emily Carr is long gone (1871—1945), her presence still hovers over British Columbia, not unlike the brooding skies that over-arch the totem poles, forests, and mountains of her rich output of drawings and paintings. Iconoclastic and outspoken, Carr once berated the head of this country’s National Gallery for failing to buy her paintings: “If the work of an isolated little old woman on the edge of nowhere is too modern for the Canadian National Gallery it seems to me it cannot be a very progressive institution.” No question that Carr was a progressive, sidestepping the other impor¬tant Canadian artists of her era (the all-male Group of Seven) to incorporate Cubism and Fauvism into her own uniquely fluid and abstract style.
Today, her works do hang in the National Gallery in Ottawa. As well, the Vancouver Art Gallery (750 Hornby Street, main entrance off Robson Plaza, Downtown, 604-662-4719) continuously exhibits part of a permanent Carr collection that spans her career. Many of these works deal with the pre-conquest native Indian reality and its spirit¬ual dimension.
Other noted BC artists whose works the gallery frequently displays include Gathie Falk, Jack Shadbolt, Toni Onley, Robert Davidson, Jeff Wall, Gordon Smith, Lawren Harris, and B.C. Binning.
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