Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.
Bless... the two painting masters who first pointed out to me (raw young pupil that I was) that there was coming and going among trees, that there was sunlight in shadows.
I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
If you're going to lick the icing off somebody else's cake you won't be nourished and it won't do you any good, - or you might find the cake had caraway seeds, and you hate them.
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.
It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.
Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!
Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.
Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence.
The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion.
The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.
The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.
There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life.
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises.
Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs.
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder.
You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.
You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.
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