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The Book of Small is a collection of thirty-six word sketches in which Emily Carr relates anecdotes about her life as a young girl in the frontier town of Victoria. She notes: “There were a great many things that I only half understood, such as saloons and the Royal Family and the Chain Gang.” The young Emily, who gave herself the nickname “Small,” was an intense, observant and sensitive yet rebellious child, who often got into scrapes because of her frankness or innocence. The vividly told stories reveal an awareness of the comedy—and pathos—of people and situations. They also offer an intimate look into childhood in a pioneer society in Victorian times. The Book of Small is a classic memoir of early childhood and a wonderful addition to your Emily Carr library.

Canadian artist Emily Carr tells her life story growing up in British Columbia; attending art schools in London, San Francisco and Paris; and her work back in B.C., Canada.

Mary Pratt's art has captivated millions of Canadians. Her luminescent paintings capture reality in a way that few artists have been able to achieve — the chip in a glass bowl, the play of light across a dish-strewn supper table, the vulnerability of a naked woman. Replete with symbolism, Pratt's work elevates the traditional still life by transforming the everyday into the iconic. Art historian Anne Koval wrote Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision in close consultation with Pratt. The book is informed by extensive interviews with the artist, and her family, friends, and colleagues and by unprecedented access to Pratt's archival holdings at Mount Allison University. This in-depth study of Pratt's life and work explores the complex issues of gender, feminism, and realism in Canadian art, resulting in a richly layered biography of an artist who redefined the visual culture of her period and whose art and life intersect in varied and surprising ways.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada's best-known artists, Jackson's Wars follows A.Y. Jackson's education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists.Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada's most memorable depictions of the world's first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson's war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal.Jackson's Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson's world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada's best-known art collective.

'A penetrating study based on unique archival material and a deep analysis into hundreds of wartime works of art.'—Tim Cook, author of The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking of Canada's Second World WarThe third volume of this award-winning series showcases paintings and drawings E. J. Hughes created during the artist's war service in Ottawa, England, Wales, and Alaska.In this, the third volume of an award-winning series on artist E. J. Hughes (1913–2007), Robert Amos turns his focus to Hughes's service in the Second World War.The narrative begins with Hughes's cadet days with the Seaforth Highlanders in Vancouver, followed by his enlistment at the Work Point Barracks in Esquimalt in 1939. Named the first “service artist” in 1941, he spent two winters in Ottawa before being posted to London where he was attached to different regiments in England and Wales. His paintings of camp life and convoys reflect his keen attention to the details of vehicles, artillery, and uniforms. In 1943 on the Alaskan island of Kiska, he transformed sub-zero weather and howling gales into a powerful document of this remote theatre of war. He returned to Ottawa where he worked until 1946—Canada's first, last, and longest-serving War Artist of the Second World War. He was also the most prolific.The book features seventy artworks from the Canadian War Museum's holdings, expanded with many personal photos and sketches from the artist's papers. The narrative situates Hughes's wartime work within the broader context of his life and his development as an artist. With the care and knowledge of a fellow artist, Amos draws the reader into this important chapter in the life of E. J. Hughes and Canadian art.

“Graceful yet precise, poetic yet deeply rooted in research, this exploration of an overlooked painter is gorgeous — a joy to read. Molly Peacock's insights and empathy with her subject bring to life both Mary Hiester Reid and her luscious flower paintings.” — Charlotte Gray, author of The Massey Murder Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career. Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women's design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America's Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life. In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O'Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet's skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid's, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.

George Gordienko (1928-2002) may be the greatest wrestler you've never heard of. From humble, Ukrainian/Cossack immigrant roots in the Canadian Prairies, he endured a tough childhood during the Great Depression to emerge as a leading'shooter'and one-of-a-kind artist on the mat. Excluded from wrestling in the United States during the McCarthy era because of his association with the Communist Party as a young man, he was deprived of a run with the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, for which he was hand-picked by the great Lou Thesz. After retirement, Gordienko transitioned to a different sort of canvas and became a successful painter. This first full-length biography traces his remarkable career.

A Globe and Mail's Spring 2021 Book Preview SelectionMolly Lamb and Bruno Bobak shot to prominence as war artists during the Second World War. Marrying shortly after the end of the war, they moved first to Vancouver and then, in 1960, to Fredericton, where they settled permanently. Molly's paintings were vibrant and colourful, featuring dynamic crowd scenes and wildflowers that seem to wave on the page. In contrast, Bruno painted near-abstract cityscapes, stunning landscapes, and distorted bodies wracked with inner torment, work that is unique in Canadian art.In this book, acclaimed author Nathan M. Greenfield brings to light the private and public lives of two of the most important figures in 20th century Canadian art. Greenfield combines archival research into Molly's diaries and letters with dozens of full-colour reproductions of their work, archival photographs, interviews with friends and contemporaries, and an analysis of paintings by both artists. The result is an intimate portrait of the art and lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak: their critical acclaim, commercial success, and a turbulent marriage that lasted over fifty years.

For Canadian impressionist Mary Riter Hamilton, capturing the emotional landscape of battlefields and graveyards in the months after the Great War's armistice became an artistic calling and defined her work. A woman alone after the storm had passed, she found that her life after the war was indelibly marked by the experience. Undeterred by a rejection from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, who nominated only male war artists abroad, in 1919 Hamilton received a commission from the Amputation Club of British Columbia (now the War Amps) to commemorate those lost at war. She travelled from Victoria to the pre-reconstruction battlefields and towns of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and the Ypres Salient where amid harsh conditions - inadequate shelter and food, surroundings littered with unexploded shells - she recorded with determination, pride, and grace the ruins of war. Based on intensive archival research in Canada, France, and Belgium, and using many previously unpublished letters, I Can Only Paint offers an insider's view of the artist's vast, underexplored body of war work and the conditions in which she created it. It places this period, central though it was, in the context of a full understanding of her life and restores the work she created there to its proper place in the canon of war art in Canada and abroad. Irene Gammel argues that Hamilton's work encoded a female perspective that distinguishes her paintings from the work of official Canadian war artists. The first reliable account of Hamilton's impressions of Canada's most haunting sites of conflict, I Can Only Paint captures with detail and sensitivity an experience that defined her life and recovers a body of work that stands as a unique and enduring portrait of the effects of the Great War.

Tom Thomson was Canada's Vincent van Gogh. He painted for a period of five years before meeting his untimely death in a remote wilderness lake in July 1917. He was buried in an unofficial grave close to the lake where his body was found. About eight hours after he was buried, the coroner arrived but never examined the body and ruled his death accidental due to drowning. A day and a half later, Thomson's family hired an undertaker to exhume the body and move it to the family plot about 100 miles away. This undertaker refused all help, and only worked at night. In 1956, John Little's father and three other men, influenced by the story of an old park ranger who never believed Thomson's body was moved by the undertaker, dug up what was supposed to be the original, empty grave. To their surprise, the grave still contained a body, and the skull revealed a head wound that matched the same location noted by the men who pulled his corpse from the water in 1917. The finding sent shockwaves across the nation and began a mystery that continues to this day. In Who Killed Tom Thomson? John Little continues the sixty-year relationship his family has had with Tom Thomson and his fate by teaming up with two high-ranking Ontario provincial police homicide detectives. For the first time, they provide a forensic scientific opinion as to how Thomson met his death, and where his body is buried. Little draws upon his father's research, plus recently released archival material, as well as his own thirty-year investigation. He and his colleagues prove that Thomson was murdered, and set forth two persons of interest who may have killed Tom Thomson.

What force of will and circumstance drove a woman from a comfortable life painting china tea services to one of hardship and loneliness in the battle zones of France and Belgium following the Great War? For western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868-1954), art was her life's passion. Her tale is one of tragedy and adventure, from homestead beginnings, to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver, to Berlin and Parisian art schools, to Vimy and Ypres, and finally to illness and poverty in old age. No Man's Land is the first biographical study of Hamilton, whose work can be found in galleries and art museums throughout Canada. Young and McKinnon's meticulous research in unpublished private collections brings to light new correspondence between Hamilton and her friends, revealing the importance of female networks to an artist's well being. Her letters from abroad, in particular, bring a woman's perspective into the immediate post-war period and give voice to trying conditions. Hamilton's career is situated within the context of her peers Florence Carlyle, Emily Carr, and Sophie Pemberton with whom she shared a Canadian and European experience.

The Writing on the Wall tells the story of artist, curator, writer and activist Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert, RCA. Although never claiming to be political and rejecting a feminist label, Cardinal-Schubert's work recognizes that the personal lived life of an Indigenous Canadian woman has social and political ramifications. During her time in the physical realm, Cardinal-Schubert supported and mentored those who struggled with the legacies of colonial histories and educated those who were unaware of how this system affected them. Here, her work leads the conversation and continues to reach and speak to those on all sides of a colonial history simultaneously. The essays included oscillate between, story-telling, art historical analysis of art works, personal narratives, academic readings of the artist's work, anecdotes and remembrances-embracing the places where the personal, the political, and the artistic meet.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Chevalier of France's Order of Arts and Letters, and recipient of the Order of Ontario, painter, printmaker, sculptor, designer, and author, Charles Pachter is one of Canada's best-loved and most celebrated artists. Pachter is an artist with an astonishing range. His work is witty, thoughtful, moving, and personal. Many works, like Queen on Moose, The Painted Flag, and Hockey Knights in Canada, have achieved a remarkable level of recognition, becoming famous across the country — indeed, around the world. His collaboration with Margaret Atwood on The Journals of Susanna Moodie has been called “truly the most magnificent book ever to be published in Canada.” Charles Pachter: Canada's Artist is a celebration of the life and work — the struggles and triumphs — of a man who has helped to redefine Canadian art. Pachter's promotion of Canada and its culture has left a lasting legacy — one that he continues to build on.

This selection of writings by twenty-nine women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman's wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children's writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general's wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women's experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.

A vividly wrought memoir, Last Dance in Shediac is a collection of the author's personal memories of her mother—celebrated Canadian artist Molly Lamb Bobak—and a tender meditation on life and death. Molly Lamb Bobak (1922–2014) was the first woman to travel overseas as an official Canadian war artist. She was also the daughter of famous Canadian artist Harold Mortimer-Lamb, whose contemporaries included Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, and Jack Shadbolt. In this homage to her artist mother, Anny Scoones rounds out her mother's public profile by revealing personal stories. Anny's memories reveal the funny and touching details of her relationship with Molly, from the road trips they took together to the visits Molly would make to Victoria to visit Anny on Glamorgan Farm, and the lovely chaos that ensued when Anny's five dogs would greet Molly in the car. Anny shares their little inside jokes and the memories they made together in a way that brings their connection—beyond mother–daughter bond to close friendship—to life for the reader. As her mother ages and becomes increasingly frail, Anny spends more and more time in Fredericton. Their road trips grow shorter, and Anny's reflections on how it feels to finally watch her mother go are tender, heartbreaking, and memorable.

Emily Carr, often called Canada's Van Gogh, was a post-impressionist explorer, artist and writer. In Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land Phyllis Marie Jensen draws on analytical psychology and the theories of feminism and social constructionism for insights into Carr's life in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century. Presented in two parts, the book introduces Carr's émigré English family and childhood on the'edge of nowhere'and her art education in San Francisco, London and Paris. Travels in the wilderness introduced her to the totem art of the Pacific Northwest coast at a time Aboriginal art was undervalued and believed to be disappearing. Carr vowed to document it before turning to spirited landscapes of forest, sea and sky. The second part of the book presents a Jungian portrait of Carr, including typology, psychological complexes, and archetypal features of personality. An examination the individuation process and Carr's embracement of transcendental philosophy reveals the richness of her personality and artistic genius. Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land provides captivating reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian studies, art history, health, gender and women's studies.

2016 Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Non-Fiction — WinnerDavid Milne is one of Canada's finest artists, a man whose work speaks to the intricate beauty of the world as he experienced it. David Milne (1882–1953) dedicated his life to exploring nature and casting it into art in a variety of modernist formats. He was born into poverty in rural Ontario and remained poor all his life because of his relentless dedication to his art. For him, art was life. Nothing mattered to him as much as the enormous “kick“ he felt when he was able to produce the image his artist's eye told him was there.Milne returned to Ontario in 1929 after a twenty-five-year stay in the United States. In every place he lived his peripatetic existence, Milne created a different kind of landscape painting. In his chosen life of solitude, his mind and hand remained very much alive.Since Milne spent as much time writing as he did painting, he provides an enormous amount of material for a life writer. His biography re-creates the texture of the artist's one-of-a-kind life and struggles, allowing a truly intimate portrait to emerge.

This is the story of a rebellious girl from British Columbia who travelled the world in pursuit of her calling only to find her true inspiration in the Canadian landscape she'd left behind. Both a prolific painter and an accomplished writer, Carr was more comfortable in the raw wilderness than in the tea rooms of London, and more at home with her unique pets than with the people around her. Despite numerous setbacks and disappointments, she persevered to become the West Coast's most celebrated artist—and a Canadian icon. Her story is a testament to individuality and an inspiration to all.

Quebec's Eastern Townships are home to a higher concentration of artists than anywhere else in Canada. With his starting and finishing point being Frederick Coburn (1871–1960), arguably Canada's best-known painter at the peak of his career, author Nick Fonda sets out to revisit his work and provide new insights and facts into Coburn's life and surroundings. To better understand the man, he also introduces other accomplished artists living and working in the same area—not all landscape painters—who have followed quite unusual paths as they responded to the same muse that moved Coburn a century ago. Based on interviews with neighbors and Coburn aficionados and Nick Fonda's own thorough understanding of the milieu in which Coburn grew up, lived, and worked, Hanging Fred and a Few Others is a lively and fascinating story of an important artist but also a reflection on the role of place—the Eastern Townships—in an artist's life. In addition to being a biography of Coburn, Nick Fonda's book provides brief biographical sketches of other artists including Minnie Gill, Denis Palmer, Mary Martin, Stuart Main, France Jodoin, and Kevin Sonmor.

In this lavishly produced hardcover volume, Plaskett has created an autobiography as colourful as his finest paintings. Plaskett begins with his early family life in New Westminster, BC, relates his encounter with abstract expressionism under Hans Hofmann, and then discusses the development of his mature style. Included are an introduction by the late George Woodcock, some 30 full-colour reproductions of Plaskett's paintings and over 90 black and white photos.

Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Writers'Association Prize for Non-FictionMary Pratt is famous throughout Canada for her luminous paintings and prints. Her 1995 exhibition, The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light, drew record-breaking crowds on its tour of Canada. It also resulted in an unprecedented amount of press coverage on the biographical content of her work. The accompanying book by Tom Smart sold more than 6,000 copies and made almost every'best book of the year'list in Canada.Mary Pratt: A Personal Calligraphy features Mary's own writings, drawn and adapted from her personal journals, the essays that she has written for numerous publications ranging from The Globe and Mail to The Glass Gazette, and the lectures that she has given at many public events. For the first time, Mary has written her own book in her own words, rather than rely on others to write about her. Treating both public and private issues, she writes of her childhood in Fredericton — her connection to her family, life in Salmonier as a young mother, her decision to pursue her own career as an artist, and her complicated relationship with her husband, Christopher. She writes about public issues — the death of Joey Smallwood, the 50th anniversary of Newfoundland's entry into Confederation, and the cod fishery. She writes about the images that interest her and influence her art, and the process of painting. Like her paintings, Pratt's writing packs a sucker punch. At first it appears to be a paean to the pleasures of house and home, until the more disturbing aspects subtly reveal themselves. Ironing shirts become an erotic act; a memory of visiting the local market with her grandmother conjures images of violence; dead chickens, meticulously plucked, and carcasses of cattle, meticulously flayed, suggest rituals of sacrifice.In Spring of 2001, Mary Pratt was awarded the Newfoundland and Labrador Writers'Association prize for Non-fiction for A Personal Calligraphy.

Sous le choc du décès prematuré de sa soeur, Normand Moffat décide d'entreprendre un voyage qu'il projette depuis longtemps, un voyage qui se veut plus un pèlerinage qu'une excursion touristique. Un voyage solitaire d'introspection plutôt que d'exploration. Destination : le Sud de la France, mais pas les plages ensoleillées de la côte ; plutôt deux monastères de la région.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada's national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman's innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate. Originally a commercial artist, Thomson fell in love with the forests and lakes of Ontario's Algonquin Park and devoted himself to rendering the north country's changing seasons in a series of colourful sketches and canvases. Dividing his time between his beloved wilderness and a shack behind the Studio Building near downtown Toronto, Thomson was a major inspiration to his painter friends who, not long after his death, went on to change the course of Canadian art as the influential - and equally controversial - Group of Seven.

Eric Cameron is a major contemporary Canadian artist. Born in 1935 in Leicester, England, he arrived in Canada in the 1970s and has taught at the University of Guelph, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and at the University of Calgary. Over the years Cameron has also continued to work in his primary medium, painting, but moved from traditional figuration to a highly conceptual practice with both his process paintings and his'thick'paintings. He has also expanded into video and has written a great deal about his work. His inspired teaching and unusual art have been recognized with major awards, including the Victor Lynch-Staunton Award (1993), the Gershorn Iskowitz Prize (1994), and the Governor General's Award (2004). Despite Cameron's prominence, much of the writing about him to date, primarily essays in exhibition catalogues, is by the artist himself. Cover and Uncover thus makes a major contribution to the field as it explores in depth Eric Cameron's art and philosophy. The book is composed of four essays, each covering a different aspect of Cameron's art, starting with Peggy Gale's analysis of his writing, then turning to Ann Davis's consideration of his process paintings and his philosophy, moving to Diana Nemiroff's review of his videos, and concluding with Thierry de Duve's observations on his Thick Paintings and his blind rejection of chance. The essays, though written independently, resonate with each other so that the reader comes away with a full picture of a complex artist, his life, his thought, his art production, and how these elements inform each other and have evolved through time. The expert commentary here, richly illustrated with Cameron's works in multiple media, provides a vital and long overdue critical lens through which to view this important artist. With Contributions By: Ann Davis Thierry de Duve Peggy Gale Diana Nemiroff

One of Canada's most evocative modern painters, Cree artist Dale Auger was a gifted interpreter of First Nations culture, using the cross-cultural medium of art to portray scenes from the everyday to the sacred and dissemble stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. Medicine Paint is a collection of Auger's best work, reproduced in glorious full colour and reflecting the evolution of the artist's distinctive style. Including a revealing look back at his life and professional development, the book is a stunning tribute to the master Aboriginal artist. Auger uses bold, bright colours in his oil paintings to explore the intricate links between spirituality and the natural laws of the land. Birds, beasts and human forms are carried from the dreamworld onto canvas, their spirits channeled through his paintbrush and presented in brilliant yellows, mystic blues, vibrant reds and swirls of black. Infusing his subjects with energy, life and colour, Dale Auger masterfully presents scenes that are powerful, spiritual and inspiring. A bald eagle is majestic in flight against a bright blue sky. An elder makes a solemn offering to the Sky Being. Horses dance playfully in the frame for a sweat lodge. A warrior draws his bow and points it skyward.'Dale Auger's artwork is stunningly beautiful.'—Globe and Mail'To show expression through your brush that comes directly from the Creator's creative source is powerful. I truly feel blessed.'—Dale Auger

Alexander Young Jackson (1882-1974) is a name that instantly conjures up images of our rugged northern landscape and the controversial Group of Seven. This is the first-ever full-length biography of one of Canada's most beloved characters, and the first to examine in one book the artist, outdoorsman, soldier, teacher, debater, writer, and outspoken defender of modern art. Jackson spent nearly seventy years travelling Canada on a lifelong quest to, rendering his impressions of its diverse character on canvas and promoting a vibrant, uniquely Canadian style of painting. From southern Alberta to Ellesmere Island, from Newfoundland to Northern British Columbia, he covered more ground than any other artist – scoffing at harsh weather and hostile criticism along the way. A.Y. Jackson takes readers on a journey through Jackson's struggles and triumphs, from his childhood in Victorian-era Montreal through his final years as a living legend of Canadian art who thought nothing of camping in a tent on Baffin Island at age 82.

While studying art in London, Emily Carr seriously undermined her health and was sent to a sanatorium for a complete rest cure. Bridling at the hospital's rules, which prohibited excitement of any kind, the always rebellious Carr proceeded to make friends, raise birds, and cause trouble. In words and enchanting sketches, Carr presents a funny, poignant account of her 18-month convalescence.

Emily Carr's journals from 1927 to 1941 portray the happy, productive period when she was able to resume painting after dismal years of raising dogs and renting out rooms to pay the bills. These revealing entries convey her passionate connection with nature, her struggle to find her voice as a writer, and her vision and philosophy as a painter.

This autobiography by Emily has been called'probably the finest... in a literary sense, ever written in Canada.'Completed just before Emily Carr died in 1945, Growing Pains tells the story of Carr's life, beginning with her girlhood in pioneer Victoria and going on to her training as an artist in San Francisco, England and France. Also here is the frustration she felt at the rejection of her art by Canadians, of the years of despair when she stopped painting. She had to earn a living, and did so by running a small apartment-house, and her painful years of landladying and more joyful times raising dogs for sale, claimed all her time and energy. Then, towards the end of her life, came unexpected vindication and triumph when the Group of Seven accepted her as one of them. Throughout, the book is informed with Carr's passionatate love of and connection with nature.Carr is a natural storyteller whose writing is vivid and vital, informed by wit, nostalgic charm, an artist's eye for description, a deep feeling for creatures and the foibles of humanity--all the things that made her previous books Klee Wyck and Book of Small so popular and critically acclaimed.

A collection of short stories about people and animals by the legendary Emily Carr that mingle the sad and the joyous, the cruel and the tender, in her unique style.The Heart of a Peacock is a collection of 51 short stories by the legendary writer and painter Emily Carr. The stories are arranged in themes such as her experiences with Native people, her adventures with various beloved creatures (particularly birds), her love of nature, and a whole section of stories about her mischievous pet monkey Woo. Together, they underline Emily Carr's place as a writer with the sharp yet tender eye of an artist, with a deep feeling for the tragedies of life and with a rich sense of the comic. The Heart of a Peacock has been in print ever since its publication in 1953, and, like her other books, has been read and loved by a couple of generations. The book is enhanced by seven of Carr's own line drawings of scenes from nature.Carr's first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck, won the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. Her writing is vital and direct, aware and poignant, as well regarded today as when first published.

One of the most vibrant artists of her generation, Pegi Nicol MacLeod was a charismatic bohemian whose expressive images of the contemporary world were an essential component of Canadian modernism during the 1930s and 1940s. In Pegi by Herself, the first full-length biography of Nicol MacLeod, Laura Brandon draws on the artist's remarkable autobiographical paintings and extraordinarily vivid letters. Remembered as much for her colourful life, love affairs, and significant friendships with Vincent Massey, Norman Bethune, Frank Scott, and Graham Spry as for her artistic achievement, Nicol MacLeod exhibited successfully and received significant commissions from the National Gallery of Canada to paint the wartime women's services. She was honoured there with a memorial exhibition following her early death in 1949. Lavishly illustrated, Pegi by Herself accompanies Pegi Nicol MacLeod: A Life in Art, a touring retrospective exhibition of the artist's work that opens at the Carleton University Art Gallery in February 2005, and the premiere of an NFB film biography.

Emily Carr was primarily a painter, but she first gained recognition as an author for her seven books about her journeys to remote Native communities and stories about life as an artist, as a small child in Victoria at the turn of the last century—and as a reluctant landlady.Before winning recognition for her painting and writing, Carr built a small apartment building with four suites (she lived in one of them) that she hoped would earn her a living. But things turned out worse than expected, and in her forties, the gifted artist found herself shoveling coal and cleaning up after people for 23 years.The House of All Sorts is a collection of 41 stories of those hard-working days and the parade of tenants- young couples, widows, sad bachelors and rent evaders— all the tears and travails of being a landlady confronted with the startling foibles of humanity. Carr is at her most acerbic and rueful, but filled with energy and inextinguishable hope.Carr's writing is vital and direct, aware and poignant, and as well regarded today as when The House of All Sorts was first published in 1944 to critical and popular acclaim. The book has been in print ever since.

Molly, an eighty-year-old artist, drowns in her bath while living alone on Vancouver Island. When her son, Toronto writer and photographer Michael Mitchell, arrives from the east the next day he finds a studio full of her paintings and a treasure trove of family papers that take him on a romantic journey to the far corners of the world and back as far as the early 18th century. Illustrated with Molly's art and her son's evocative photographs of her empty house and studio, The Molly Fire collages dance cards, war diaries, menus, naval dispatches, and news reports to create a vivid and moving memoir as well as a poignant meditation on loss and identity. Shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Award, the 2005 Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, and a Globe & Mail Top 100 Book of 2005.

The legendary Emily Carr was primarily a painter, but she first gained recognition as an author. She wrote seven popular, critically acclaimed books about her journeys to remote Native communities and about her life as an artist—as well as her life as a small child in Victoria at the turn of the last century.The Book of Small is a collection of 36 short stories about a childhood in a town that still had vestiges of its pioneer past. With an uncanny skill at bringing people to life, Emily Carr tells stories about her family, neighbours, friends and strangers—who run the gamut from genteel people in high society to disreputable frequenters of saloons—as well as an array of beloved pets. All are observed through the sharp eyes and ears of a young, ever-curious and irrepressible girl, and Carr's writing is a disarming combination of charm and devastating frankness.Carr's writing is vital and direct, aware and poignant, and as well regarded today as when she was first published to both critical and popular acclaim. The Book of Small has been in print ever since its publication in 1942, and, like Klee Wyck, has been read and loved by a couple of generations.

Collected from Emily Carr's private and public writings, these previously unpublished pieces reveal the outspoken artist at her most forthright. Expurgated sections from Carr's journals detail her anguished meditations on her spiritual mission, musings about Native culture and the white community's reaction to it, and thoughts about her family. Her groundbreaking 1913 “Lecture on Totems”, her first recorded writing on Native art and people, is also included, as are some of her most fascinating letters to friends and colleagues.

Douglas & McIntyre is proud to announce definitive, completely redesigned editions of Emily Carr's seven enduring classic books. These are beautifully crafted keepsake editions of the literary world of Emily Carr, each with an introduction by a distinguished Canadian writer or authority on Emily Carr and her work.Emily Carr's first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck ('Laughing One'), in honour of the name that the Native people of the west coast gave to her. This collection of twenty-one word sketches about Native people describes her visits and travels as she painted their totem poles and villages. Vital and direct, aware and poignant, it is as well regarded today as when it was first published in 1941 to instant and wide acclaim, winning the Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. In print ever since, it has been read and loved by several generations of Canadians, and has also been translated into French and Japanese.Kathryn Bridge, who, as an archivist, has long been well acquainted with the work of Emily Carr, has written an absorbing introduction that places Klee Wyck and Emily Carr in historical and literary context and provides interesting new information.

Musician, artist, anti-smoker, ecological gadfly — here is Mendelson Joe's story, in his own outrageous word. He believes that speaking out can make a difference, that women are the only hope for the future, and that there's truth in a good blues song. He doesn't believe in God, compromise, or schmaltz. Meet Mendelson Joe: musician, artist, activist, and avid writer of letters to Canadian politicians and editors. Alien brings together some of the best of Joe's artwork, along with extensive interviews with the man and the people who know him. Joe holds forth on the things that fascinate him: the female body, motorcycles, rabbits, nature, art, and music. He tells of touring the world with his blues-rock band Mendelson McKenna Mainline in the early'70s, sharing concert stages with burlesque strippers, and discovering a passion for art after rescuing a set of acrylic paints from a garbage can. He also talks about the things that make him angry: the stupidity of humans, who “piss where they drink,” destroying the environment through greed and carelessness; the treatment of women by men; racism. And Joe's friends and colleagues talk about knowing this funny, talented, and deeply principled guy who's never afraid to speak his mind.

This biography of acclaimed Canadian artist York Wilson (1907-1984) is written by Lela Wilson, his wife of 51 years. The biography documents Wilson's art education and commercial art career, and explores his entry into the Toronto art scene, his quick rise to local and national fame, his leading role in Canadian art, and his forging of an international reputation as a serious, innovative painter. From the mid-1950s to 1970, York Wilson cemented his reputation as Canada's pre-eminent muralist. In Toronto his public commissions included murals for the O'Keefe Centre for the Performing Arts, the Salvation Army, Imperial Oil, Bell Telephone, and Central Hospital. He also completed murals in Thunder Bay, Montreal, Ottawa, and Timmins.

This volume by A.Y. Jackson's niece provides fascinating insights into the man and his work at a time the author calls'a rugged-romantic high point in A.Y.'s life.'The illustrations reproduced and discussed come mainly from the Carleton University Art Collection. Groves places the works in the context of Canadian art history and social history.

Winner of the 1999 International Gallery of Superb Printing Gold Award for Superb Craftsmanship in Production Franz Johnston is the missing man of Canadian painting. The most prolific and financially successful of the original Group of Seven, Johnston's paintings were among the most sought after in Canada in the years between the mid-1920s and his death in 1949. They appear in the collections of dozens of discriminating private collectors, and in institutions such as the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Collection, and the Canadian War Museum. As well, his work once hung, in thousands of well-loved reproductions, on the walls of ordinary people's homes the length and breadth of the country. And yet, for all his distinguished success, Johnston is no more than a footnote in the many histories of the Group of Seven, and is rarely mentioned in the context of the general development of art in Canada in the twentieth century. Johnston was born and raised in Toronto, worked with J.E.H. MacDonald, Fred Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Franklin Carmichael at Grip, the famous commercial art studio in Toronto, and served with distinction as an official war artist in the last years of the First World War. He subsequently taught at the art schools in Winnipeg and Toronto (he was the principal of the Winnipeg Art School and Gallery for four years in the early 1920s) before opening his own art school on the shores of Georgian Bay. When the Group of Seven held its first, seminal exhibition at the Art Museum of Toronto in May 1920, Johnston exhibited and sold more paintings than any of the others. In this, the first biography of Franz Johnston, the author seeks to provide a guide to the life, work, and times of this unjustly neglected, but influential figure in Canadian art and culture. Beautifully illustrated with sixteen four-colour reproductions of Johnston's best paintings, and rare black-and-white photographs from a family collection and other sources.

This is an intimate biography of an artist who became a legend after his death, but who in his private life stands revealed as a troubled man who was, in many ways, his own victim. Joan Murray's new biography is part detective work, too: she investigates his beliefs, and the origins of his great masterpieces, and provides a convincing description of the possible circumstances of his death. The art of Tom Thomson represents one of the high points of Canadian modernism, which flourished in the first two decades of this century. During his brief career, lasting just five years, Thomson evolved a highly intense, naturalistic style, introducing formal innovations and challenging the idiom of the tonal landscape of painters popular in his day. Thomson's idiosyncratic expressionist landscape art reflected the intellectual and psychological climate of pre-World War I Canada. It developed against the complex cultural background that produced the poets Bliss Carmen and Duncan Campbell Scott and, later, the painters of the Group of Seven. Despite his short creative life, and only half a decade of mature artistic activity, Thomson, a superb designer, produced an extensive body of work - more than thirty canvases and three hundred oil sketches - in a remarkably personal style, characterized by unusual colour combinations and strong patterns. Through it he conveyed the existential dimension of nature, making Algonquin Park - its trees, waters, and winds - the principal subject of his work.

What happens when an individual becomes the subject of many and divergent portraits? “Biography,” says Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, “is a deceptive genre. Positioned between fact and fiction and elusive in its purposes, biography displays an individual life, an existence patterned by conventions that have also shaped the reader's experience.” In This Woman in Particular, Walker explores versions of Emily Carr's life that have appeared over the last half-century. Walker contends that the biographical image of Emily Carr that emerges from an accumulation of biographies, films, plays and poetry as well as her own autobiographical writing establishes an elaborated cultural artefact — an “image” that is bound by its very nature to remain forever incomplete and always elusive. She demonstrates how changes in Carr's biographical image parallel the maturing of Canadian biographical writing, reflecting attitudes toward women artists and the shifting balance between religion, secular attitudes and contemporary spirituality. And she concludes that biography plays a crucial role in all our lives in initiating and sustaining debate on vital personal and collective concerns.