Emily Carr’s Alive stands as a powerful testament to a pivotal moment in the artist’s life and creative evolution. Painted shortly after her recovery from a major heart attack in 1937, the work’s title carries unmistakable emotional weight. To name a painting Alive at such a moment was not merely descriptive—it was a declaration. Carr had returned to painting with renewed vitality as she embarked on an extraordinary period of artistic productivity that resulted in works such as Roll of Life and Spring Wave, both sold by Heffel, and Juice of Life, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Alive radiates an elemental energy, a life force that seems to surge upward through the natural forms she depicts.

Within Alive, one can sense the profound resurgence that defined this chapter of her career. The painting presents a dynamic forest scene alive with movement, colour and spiritual energy. A towering tree dominates the foreground, its trunk thick and rooted, its branches sweeping upward in expressive, almost wind-driven arcs. Around it, smaller trees and undergrowth cluster in rhythmic, curving forms, as if the entire forest is breathing in unison. Carr’s signature swirling brush-strokes give the vegetation a sense of motion—nothing here feels still or static. Her brushwork and composition evoke movement, growth and spiritual renewal, as if nature itself is stretching towards the sky in an act of affirmation. The result is a work that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant—a visual expression of survival, gratitude, and the enduring vitality of the natural world.

Carr’s persistent financial constraints did little to hinder her artistic evolution; rather, they yielded an ingenuity that became fundamental to her creative practice. Lacking the means to purchase traditional materials in abundance, in the 1930s, she devised an innovative painting medium by thinning high-quality white house paint with gasoline or turpentine and enriching it with the finest pigments she could reasonably afford. Complementing this experimentation, she engineered a portable easel designed to support large sheets (24 x 36 inches) of inexpensive manila paper bought in bulk, a practical solution that suited her constraints and also provided artistic freedom. This combination of resourcefulness and technical invention proved transformative during her extensive sketching excursions around Victoria in the 1930s. Carr embraced this new medium, which enabled gestural, fluid and rhythmic brushwork, producing compositions marked by a heightened sense of renewal and expressive force.

The provenance of Alive is superb and reaches back to its purchase in 1943 by Dorothy Salisbury, a librarian at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Public Library. Carr staged an exhibition at the UBC library in 1939, and it is possible Salisbury attended this show. She acquired Alive from Carr’s solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1943, and the sale is recorded in the financial records of the VAG Archives. Carr sold few paintings during her lifetime, and only rarely did she sell a painting from one of the many exhibitions in which she participated, so the sale of Alive would have been an important event for the artist.

On verso of this work are two significant labels. One label is signed, titled and priced $50 in the artist’s hand, which is rare. Another label is likely from the 1943 Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Emily Carr at the Seattle Art Museum, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, which states the painting details, the original owner, Dorothy Salisbury’s name and address, and is also marked for sale, with an insured value of $60.

Alive was a painting Carr would have been proud of, having shown it many times in her lifetime. Fittingly, in contemporary times, Alive was on long-term loan at the Gordon Smith Gallery, from 1999 until its consignment to Heffel. Carr is being celebrated in 2026 with a major retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, That Green Ideal: Emily Carr and the Idea of Nature.

We thank Dr. Michael Polay, contributing author to Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing—French Modernism and the West Coast, for his assistance in researching this lot.