A new exhibition featuring the work of the late, great Canadian painter Emily Carr reminded me, strangely enough, of the final onscreen performance of filmmaker David Lynch in The Fabelmans, a fictional retelling of Steven Spielberg’s early life and entry into the film world.
Lynch plays the legendary American director John Ford, complete with a huge stogie and an eye patch. In the scene that sprang to mind while I was at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Lynch, playing Ford, commands young Spielberg to tell him what makes the paintings in his office interesting.
The younger filmmaker stumbles for the right reply before realizing it’s staring him right in the face. It’s the horizon.
In Carr’s paintings of the dense, dark rainforests of coastal B.C., even finding the horizon can prove a challenge. Nevertheless, they play a critical role in Carr’s work. We see this especially in the recent exhibition of her work at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape. The selection is curated by Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky senior curator of Canadian art.
In the VAG show, an entire wall is given over to Carr’s forests, a dense, salon-style hang that groups the work into mostly a collection of art that has a portrait (read: vertical) orientation, marking a departure from the horizontal alignment commonly used when painting landscapes.
As Hill noted in his introduction, Carr was essentially making tree portraits.

Carr is both a legendary figure and a force in Vancouver, with a university named after her. Her story has been told in films, music, books and even contemporary dance. It might seem like there isn’t much left to say about Carr and her legacy. But her relationship with Canadian painter Jack Shadbolt, and the influence she had on his art, paints a unique portrait of mentorship and innovation.
Understanding their exchange offers a deeper comprehension of some of the driving forces behind Canadian art.
It seems fitting, then, that the exhibition of Emily Carr’s paintings and a local talk about a book featuring the writing of Jack Shadbolt are both taking place in Vancouver this week.

‘I paint because I must’
The book Jack Shadbolt: In His Words, introduced and edited by writer Susan Mertens, is a collection of Shadbolt’s writing — poems, journal entries, letters — shot through with images of his iconic paintings and personal photographs.
In keeping with the Ford-Lynch-Spielberg collision in The Fabelmans, the mash-up of Carr and Shadbolt is an interesting reminder that artists, no matter their medium or practice, often wrestle with similar issues: namely, how to manifest, channel and capture the essence or truth of something, whether it’s cedar trees, butterflies or Eraserhead.
Much of the collected writing captures Shadbolt in the process of trying to figure shit out.
In an introduction to the book’s second chapter called “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Part 1,” he writes about this impulse in poetic form.
Why do I paint? I paint because I must.
But why must I? As Picasso would
answer, why must a bird sing?
I want a kind of dangerous art, risking the daemonic —
a form emerging out of chaos like a rare monster surfacing from the deep, throwing off
spumes, breathing the air.
It’s a typical approach of a young firebrand that will be familiar to anyone who kept an early journal filled with bravado, insecurity and the zinging energy of youth and ambition.
As young men, Shadbolt and his friends were actively in search of something bigger, bolder and more interesting. They were bored with the stifling, provincial atmosphere of Victoria, B.C.
And they found what they were looking for in Emily Carr, who was also living in Victoria.
Carr’s choice to embrace the life of the artist on the far edges of society was deeply compelling to the young Shadbolt. When the pair first met, Carr was moving into a period of some success and renown. She had been invited to participate in a show with the Group of Seven, organized by the then-director of the National Gallery, in Ottawa.
The trip back east had introduced Carr and her work to many of the key Canadian artists of the era, although this recognition did little to boost her popularity in her hometown, where she was still regarded as a strange and somewhat odd character.

‘We’d sit, often everybody very silent’
In their early 20s, Shadbolt and his group of friends would often visit Carr, who at the time would have been in her mid-50s.
Shadbolt describes their first meeting in the book. “I was just a kid when my friend Max, who knew Emily Carr, took me over and introduced me. Anyone who was interested in art would have heard the legends of this strange woman and got to know that she was round about Victoria; and we were dying for any artistic contact we could get.
“Once we began visiting Emily, we used to frequently call around on a Saturday afternoon, and she’d have tea. We’d sit, often everybody very silent. She didn’t talk much at times.”
Recollections of their time together, taken from the perspective of a young Shadbolt, are sometimes imbued with the casual cruelty that the young bring to assessments of their elders.
Shadbolt writes that Carr sold a sketch for $10 to his friend, noting that she probably needed the money.
At the time, Carr was in fact desperately poor, using gasoline as a paint thinner, and trying to find her way back into making meaningful work.
For his part, Shadbolt was saving his pennies to buy a book and declined to purchase Carr’s work.
To be fair, the 21-year-old Shadbolt had no way of knowing at the time that he would later be able to afford to buy more than one piece of art.
The influence of Carr on his life and work continued in multiple ways, including a suite of drawings dedicated to her. An act of both homage and exorcism, it was described as a way for Shadbolt to acknowledge Carr as well as free himself.
Shadbolt’s long career in arts education included teaching drawing and painting at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and co-founding a charitable arts foundation with his wife.
Years after his death, the foundation continues today as the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The relationship was full of curiosities.
Shadbolt writes: “She had a sense of the grand structure. She went for the big form, simplifying it, getting the big bones of the landscape, the massive architecture of the forest and the huge connections and spatial rhythms between things.
“Somebody who had a sense for this powerful grandeur was a very strong stimulation for a young artist and that’s something I never got over.”

Carr, in her encounters, was less than impressed with the young Shadbolt, writing in a letter to a friend: “Jack Shadbolt was over to see me he had improved some (in himself), has no work. Of course, he is very opinionated and is swaddled in art history and art appreciation. I would be interested to see what practice he can put it into.
“These boys have big talk and little do so often. He was quite caustic and a little patronizing over my feeble efforts — maybe right.”

What emerges from looking at and reading the thoughts of both painters is just what a struggle art can be. Much of Shadbolt’s writing is a series of agonized wrestling matches, trying to bring into being what he wanted to capture.
In this aspect, the two B.C. artists are often linked, with Shadbolt taking on the mantle of Carr’s spiritual successor.
How to convey the majesty of this place?
In the book on Shadbolt’s life, Mertens quotes Sarah Milroy, the executive director and chief curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection:
Building on Carr’s somewhat romanticized way of experiencing the landscape, he [Shadbolt] came to hold a political view of man’s place in nature, and the competing claims of aboriginal and European settlers — a context that still stimulates public life in British Columbia today and continues to be central to the art of the region....The contest between worlds is not resolved but rather rendered endlessly problematic. His paintings tell us clearly: Landscape is a place where power plays itself out. In this lies the first great part of Shadbolt’s legacy.
How each artist contends differently with their environment is a source of ongoing fascination.
In this aspect, both Shadbolt and Carr are deep in the weeds in their efforts to translate and transform the raw materials of trees, rocks and mountains into something deeper.
That the tools of paint and canvas can hold ineffable essence and truth of a place always feels slightly miraculous. This is doubly true of interpretations of the different landscapes that make up Canada.


Back at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Carr’s exhibition features a quote from the artist about a trip she took to meet Lawren Harris, a member of the legendary Canadian painting collective the Group of Seven.
In explaining his motivation in bringing Carr’s works together, curator Richard Hill noted in a statement: “From my earliest encounters with Carr’s paintings I was struck by the density of her forests; not only the thickness of the growth, but the way she paints it. In her later works she stylizes trees and bushes into massed, solid volumes, often closing off space — or at least making it challenging to project yourself into the space of the painting.”
Hill’s impressions of Carr echo the young Shadbolt’s feelings about her work. Again, all the verbiage and theory fall away in the face of the paintings themselves. Here they are in all their magnificence and knotty power.
The more than 20 forest landscapes featured in the exhibition are dark, dense and weighty. It’s easy to stand in front of them as a collective and feel like you might fall into the void that is deep in the heart of each individual painting. Such is the power of Carr’s palette and brushwork.

The density of the work, grouped tightly together on one wall of the gallery, is offset by a single painting on the opposite wall. The horizon in one of Carr’s most famous works, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, positively explodes in a penumbra that is almost religious in its exultation.
It’s worth getting up close and personal with the work, looking carefully at the brush strokes themselves. It is a conduit, a direct path into the heart of the creator and a reminder that art is a fundamental human act, a defining characteristic of our existence. But it’s also a discipline and hard work.
Carr is not as well known as she should be outside of Canada; plans are now afoot for a touring exhibition of her work. It’s another reminder of Shadbolt’s legacy and enduring impact, present in both his artwork as well as his literary work, which runs through In His Words.
Both Carr and Shadbolt were united in their individual struggles to give voice to this place, in all its staggering and unique beauty.
As Shadbolt wrote of Carr: “Her paintings were on my home territory: I loved the same things. I loved every rock and tree of British Columbia and I still do.”
‘Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape’ runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Jan. 4, 2026. Susan Mertens will be speaking about the book ‘Jack Shadbolt: In His Words’ at UBC’s Point Grey campus on Feb. 1.
Read more: Books, Art, Photo Essays
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