About this work
I've confirmed the work. *Sky* is an oil on wove paper painting by Emily Carr, dated 1935–1936, measuring 58.7 × 90.7 cm, and held in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, which acquired it in 1937. With this grounding, here is the product description:
*Sky* arrives horizontally — an unusual format for Carr, and one that surrenders almost everything to atmosphere. The composition is dominated by an expansive, churning West Coast sky rendered in oil on wove paper, a format that gives the surface a particular immediacy, as though the paint breathes with the paper beneath it. Working in the mid-1930s, Carr used a modernist yet representational style to depict her subjects with powerful, sculptural forms inhabiting shallow space, and the spiritual elevation is shown in rising rhythms of brushstrokes that swirl into the lyrical, sublime light above. Greens and greys, deep blues and churning whites move in broad, confident strokes across the picture plane, Carr coaxing the feeling of air pressing down and light breaking through in equal measure. It is less a depiction of the sky than an argument that the sky is alive.
In the mid-1930s, Carr — inspired by Lawren Harris — began searching for the divine within nature.
After 1933, her formal and spiritual concerns were fused with her concept of "unity in movement."
She worked on paper and used gasoline to thin her oil paints, resulting in a viscosity and density that still retained the ease of watercolour during her excursions; initially she used these materials only for sketches, but by 1936 she was making finished works in these media — and with this new technique she was able to demonstrate the powerful expressionistic forces she sought more directly. *Sky* sits squarely in that shift. Her later paintings of the vast Canadian West Coast sky and monumental trees, with their sweeping brushstrokes, demonstrate her desire to paint in a "big" way that she felt was in keeping with the expansiveness of her environment. The National Gallery's purchase of the work in 1937 — during Carr's lifetime — confirmed what eastern Canada was only beginning to understand.
On a wall, *Sky* commands a kind of quiet authority. It suits rooms with natural light, where the tonal shifts in the paint — now dark and brooding, now luminous — can change with the hour. It speaks to anyone drawn to nature not as backdrop but as force: to viewers who know the particular weight of a Pacific cloud front, or who understand sky as something that presses back. Carr used all she had learned and seen during her lifetime to represent the world as a vital, unifying energy — and in *Sky*, that energy has nowhere else to go but outward, directly into the room.
