Marilyn Jones | Emily Carr Chronicler

Why Emily Carr Kept a Can of Gasoline Beside Her Easel

Published: 4 September, 2026
Written by Marilyn Jones

Beginning around 1932, Carr largely abandoned traditional watercolour for her field studies. Instead, she began using oil paint (and sometimes house paint) thinned with gasoline on manilla paper, creating a medium that combined the fluidity of watercolour with the rich colour and permanence of oil. This technique became central to many of her finest forest paintings of the 1930s. Read more: Why Emily Carr Kept a Can of…

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Doris Shadbolt and Emily Carr: A Legacy Discovered, Interpreted and Preserved

Published: 3 September, 2026
Written by Marilyn Jones

Doris Shadbolt (November 28, 1918 – December 22, 2003) occupies a distinctive place in the history of Emily Carr. She did not know Carr personally—Carr died in 1945, the same year Shadbolt moved to Vancouver—but over the next three decades Shadbolt became one of the people most responsible for shaping how Carr’s art was understood, exhibited and written about. Her relationship with Carr was therefore not one of friendship or personal acquaintance,…

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Chronology of Emily Carr (1871–1945)

Published: 1 September, 2026
Written by Marilyn Jones

Emily Carr’s life was a remarkable journey from a privileged Victorian childhood in Victoria to becoming one of Canada’s most distinctive painters and writers. Born in 1871, she studied art in San Francisco, London and Paris before travelling throughout British Columbia, where the forests, landscapes and Indigenous communities profoundly influenced her work. Recognition came slowly. After her ambitious 1913 Vancouver exhibition, Carr withdrew from the art world for more than a decade,…

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