From The Vancouver Sun:
WHISTLER — When did Emily Carr become the Emily Carr loved by Canadians across the country?
A new exhibition at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler makes the visual argument that a big step in Carr’s transformation from someone with talent into one of Canada’s top artists occurred during her trip to France in 1910 and 1911. During those 16 months, Carr took lessons from artists who could teach her about a new approach to artmaking called modernism being followed by the avant-garde in Paris. The lessons paid off: Carr’s work was chosen for the 1911 exhibition in the city’s Salon d’Automne, arguably the top art show in the world at the time.
Kiriko Watanabe is co-curator along with Kathryn Bridge of the AAM exhibition, Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing, which opens Saturday.
Watanabe said the exhibition brings together 64 watercolours and paintings from numerous private and public collections. They’re arranged chronologically and include works that Carr made in France, as well as works she did immediately after returning to B.C. and going on a summer trip up the coast to the remote Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw communities.
“There was a window of time after she came back from France until she started visiting First Nations villages that summer,” Watanabe said at the museum. “That’s probably when she started looking at her old works, her watercolours, and started to incorporate colours and techniques she learned in France. You can see her confidence increasing.”
