I select in the Visual Artist category, EMILY CARR:
Portrait by Nan Chaney, 1937
I lived in Vancouver for five years in the early 1990s. Emily Carr's prescence is everywhere there. One summer day, an Aussie girl and I smoked a big fattie, and sat mesmerized by her paintings for hours at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I've also seen her paintings at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa. Her paintings are intense - they speak to the sub-conscious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_carr
Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a "Canadian icon".
Carr is remembered primarily for her painting. She was one of the first artists to attempt to capture the spirit of Canada in a modern style. Previously, Canadian painting had been mostly portraits and representational landscapes. Carr's main themes in her mature work were natives and nature: "native totem poles set in deep forest locations or sites of abandoned native villages" and, later, "the large rhythms of Western forests, driftwood-tossed beaches and expansive skies". [11] She blended these two themes in ways uniquely her own. Her "qualities of painterly skill and vision [...] enabled her to give form to a Pacific mythos that was so carefully distilled in her imagination".[11]
Her painting can be divided into several distinct phases: her early work, before her studies in Paris; her early paintings under the Fauvist influence of her time in Paris; a post-impressionist middle period[12] before her encounter with the Group of Seven; and her later, formal period, under the post-cubist influences of Lawren Harris and American artist and friend, Mark Tobey.[13] She used charcoal and watercolour for her sketches. The greatest part of her mature work was oil on canvas or, when money was scarce, oil on paper.
http://www.gallery.ca/english/546_733.htm
Digital Collection:
http://bcheritage.ca/emilycarrhomework/main.htm
Vancouver Art Gallery:
http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibiti...r/en/index.php
