The oil on paper works she produced throughout the 1930s are among the most vibrant and expressive of Emily Carr’s oeuvre. As she moved away from larger studio canvases, Carr entered a profoundly inventive and productive period, immersing herself in the coastal forests of British Columbia. Woods Edge, executed around 1938, beautifully captures the essential qualities and kinetic spirit of this crucial moment in her practice.

Seeking a transportable and inexpensive method for her sketching excursions, Carr began to use oil thinned with gasoline on large sheets of lightweight manila paper. While she was an accomplished watercolourist, it was a cumbersome medium to work with. Her new technique offered a watercolour-like effect with the chromatic intensity of oil and a fluid application that better suited her new focus on capturing the landscape’s inherent movement. Her brush-strokes became open and intuitive, responding directly to the vitality she sensed in the forest. The solid, sculpted elements of her earlier works gave way to soft lines and graceful gestures, entwining into one continuous flow of animated form. Through her vigorous brushwork, Carr conveyed the felt experience of her surroundings, its distinctive cadence and resonant energy. She notes in her journals in September 1935:

Everything is green. Everything is waiting and still. Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out your eye passes. Nothing is crowded; there is living space for all. Air moves between each leaf. Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. Everything is alive.

Woods Edge exemplifies Carr’s reverential vision of life teeming within the forest interior. Here, a tangled network of branches, rendered as wisps of black pigment, curl and stretch across the roiling ochre clearing. In the foreground, sinewy tree trunks reach towards the lush green canopy above: an undulating mass rippling and converging like oceanic currents meeting midwater. Dappled sunlight breaks through as flecks of white paint, softly illuminating the dense woodland. Each element surges with life, woven together in a symphonic rhythm, a single harmonious current of energy. Amongst the trees stand their remnants: two rugged stumps in earthy browns and inky black, at once signaling Carr’s lament at deforestation and her fierce admiration for the resiliency of nature, its steadfast renewal and the inherent beauty found in all cycles of life.

In 1938, Woods Edge was shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Seventh Annual B.C. Artists’ Exhibition, one of the few occasions in her lifetime that Carr formally exhibited her oil on paper works. Four decades later, in 1980, the painting was featured in The Group of Seven and Their Contemporaries, part of an important exhibition and sale of the Fannin Hall Collection at Kenneth G. Heffel Fine Art Inc. in Vancouver. The exhibition brought together masterpieces by Carr alongside works by the Group of Seven, underscoring her integral role in shaping the visual language of Canadian modernism.

Heffel has been deeply connected to the art of Emily Carr since our founding in 1978, and it was through such exhibitions that we established a national reputation for expertise and leadership in Canadian art. In 1995, we inaugurated our auction division, and this year we proudly mark our 30th anniversary of live auctions, continuing the vision set forth by Kenneth G. Heffel. To present this painting now is to celebrate not only Carr’s lasting influence on Canadian visual identity nearly a century later but also Heffel’s milestones in bringing Canada’s most vital art to the world stage.

Emily Carr is being celebrated in the 2025 Northern Lights exhibition organized by the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, showcasing her visionary landscapes and cultural depth. Touring to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the show broadens her international reach and affirms her vital place in modern art history.