Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers and the Spirits of the Forest
(Canada / 2010 / 90 min. / Director - Michael Ostroff / Screenplay - Michael Ostroff / Cinematography - Leigh Uttley)
The film presents an eloquent portrait of the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945). It focuses on her creative journey, on the reasons for her artistic drive, as well as her choice of themes, style, and colours. It is generously interlaced with the quotations from Carr’s own writings. What comes to the forefront is her search for something that would satisfy her fully and not being able to find it.
She searches for it in the nature, in the Canada’s vast British Columbia forests. Right at the beginning of the film she is quoted asking herself this question, “What do these forests make you feel? What is it you are straggling for? What is the vital thing that woods posses that you want? Why do you go back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there, being unable to find it? It’s in there, yet so far away. You cannot reach it. Oh, you old fool, do not try to force these great forests, woe them.’
Thought Carr had rejected the organized religion at an early age, she never rejected her spiritual needs, “No church, no philosophy, you have to travel the road for yourself, you must find for yourself.”
She embraces loneliness, not finding consolation in the human crowds.
“What most attracts me in those wild, deep, solitary places – nobody goes there. The loneliness and quiet are unbroken. The loneliness repels them, the dug smells, the awful solemnity of the aged old tree makes you feel perfectly infinitesimal. They stay outside and talk about it. It’s bad for them but good for those who enter because holiness and quite are unbroken. I see clearer what I am away from humans in the woods.”
The film makes it obvious that Carr is searching for her own spirituality through the act of painting. It is as if by trying to capture on a canvas the spirit of the woods and wilderness, and the spirits that animate the Indian totem poles and carvings, she tried to reclaim her own spirituality and her connection to the ‘holiness’, a word used repeatedly throughout the film when quoting her writings.
Native Americans believed that the spirit of a person got caught in a picture, and this is why they refused to be photographed. Was it the same principle by which Carr was trying to capture the spirit of the nature, of the woods, and of the totem poles and imprint them onto her paintings, trying to repossess them for herself in an attempt to reconnect to her own spirituality? Is this why she is using the brush strokes, colours and shapes in such a novel way for her times so they would portray that all illusive spirit she is searching for?
Her art was too avangard for her times. It was not accepted and she stopped painting for 15 years. This changed when the National Gallery approached her to exhibit her art and when she discovered the Group of Seven and began a long lasting correspondence with Lawren Harris.
“Oh God, What have I seen! Something had spoken to the very soul of me! Wonderful! Mighty! Not of this world! Oh, these men, this Group of Seven, what have they created? If I knew where to find the God, a God to pray to, I would pray. God Bless the Group of Seven.” She also wrote about Lawren Harris’ paintings, “There is holiness about them, something you cannot describe but just feel.”
After seeing Emily Carr’s works, Lawren Harris tells her that she is one of them. Encouraged, Carr begins to paint, but this time, advised by Harris to depart from the native motives and to find herself instead ( He wrote to her, “Put aside Indian motives, strike out for yourself. ” ) she focuses more on painting the nature and the woods.
In another letter, Harris also tells her, “We are only content when all our sails are full with the winds of heaven. I hope all your winds are up and full of the winds of heaven.” This statement makes it obvious that both Harris and Carr perceived their creative impulse as that of being of heaven, as being spiritually inspired.
Carr once again embarked on a vigorous search of the spiritual through her painting. Yet there comes a startling realization: “the great forest, full of unseen things, and great silence…..and when I look at my paintings, there is nothing in it.... Oh, I am frightened when I look over at my paintings. There is nothing to it, just paint, dead and forlorn. I want my things to rock and sway with the fluids of life. But there they sit, weak and still.” And once again he asks herself in desperation: “What is it you are struggling for? It’s there … but I cannot catch hold of it.” Then she states, “I do not believe in the supernatural beings. Still, who understands the mystery of the forest?”When in the middle of the night, all alone in the woods, she steps into a flowing water she exclaims, “I stand alone on my own perfect good feet in the stream at night, Life, Life, Life.” With this realization she begins to attempt to catch the light and the movement of the forest, her brush strokes becoming more free, fluid, and flowing.
“Everything is waiting and still. Colours you have not noticed come out.”
“I am looking for something so light, so tender, as mysterious as a tear.”
“Slowly things begin to move and slip into their places, groups and lines tie themselves together. Colours come out … Everything is alive, air is alive, sun is alive, silence is full of sound.”
At the end of the film a quotation is read, “I never before realized the relation between one’s pictures and oneself. Maybe the Indians were right and that something of you can get trapped forever in the picture as long as it lasts.”
Did Carr succeed in discovering her own spirituality or did she simply leave us something of herself permanently trapped in her paintings? Or maybe they are simply the spirits of the woods and of the Indian sacred objects as seen through her eyes that got caught in the paintings?
Can one’s spirituality be found by means of the creative act of painting? Can light and life be created through artistic means, through a person’s will for them to be expressed on canvas?
There are two short videos with excerpts form the film Wind of Heaven posted on YouTube:
EMILY CARR: WINDS OF HEAVEN
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