Victoria exhibit celebrates Emily Carr, totem of B.C. artists
 |
|
||||||||||
The artist Emily Carr has become a beloved British Columbia icon — and for those who want to see more of her work and life, the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria has a major exhibit.
Carr's intensely colored, moody paintings of B.C.'s coastal forests, native villages and totem poles are bountifully reproduced in books, posters and greeting cards; her Victoria home is a museum; and her autobiographical books are steady sellers.
Some of her oil paintings are in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. But the Royal B.C. Museum has gone all out with the exhibit "Emily Carr; Eccentric, Artist, Author, Genius" which runs until April 7.
Carr, a Victoria native who died in 1945, traveled for decades along the B.C. coast to sketch and paint remote Indian villages, including in the Queen Charlotte Islands, the homeland of the Haida.
At home in Victoria (where her childhood home is preserved as the Emily Carr House museum), she was known as an indomitable, eccentric person with a fearless tongue and a houseful of beloved pets — cats, dogs, a monkey, squirrels and more.
The Royal B.C. Museum exhibit includes more than 80 of Carr's oil paintings and watercolors; excerpts from her diaries; her handicrafts, including pottery and hooked rugs; evening lectures; interactive computer exhibits and more.
Information:
• Royal British Columbia Museum: 675 Belleville St. (on Victoria's Inner Harbour next to the Parliament Buildings), 250-356-7226, www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca.
Besides the Carr exhibit, the museum has excellent permanent exhibits on British Columbia's history and peoples.
• A Web site with extensive information on Carr is www.emilycarr.ca.
• Emily Carr House museum: 207 Government Street (a 10-minute walk from the Royal B.C. Museum), 250-383-5843 (closed in January; call ahead for hours), www.heritage.gov.bc.ca/emily/emily.htm.