Emily Carr
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, 1935, Oil on canvas, 112 x 68.9 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery; Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.15, Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of Sky
Commentary by Harry O. Maier
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of Sky is one of three paintings Emily Carr created in the 1930s. They were made as commentary on the environmental devastation brought about by large-scale industrial logging that started in the 1860s in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia.
Carr creates an undulating depiction of a stripped landscape dominated by billowing white clouds lined menacingly in grey at their top and the bottom. Blue sky struggles to break through. Spindly conifers passed over by the loggers rise from a clear cut. Their flimsy branches appear at the highest points against the clouds. Grey and black stumps are in the foreground of a denuded, brown landscape. Other trees surround them, vulnerable to what the portrait portends.
Carr describes the scene in a journal written at the time of the painting:
There’s a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the ‘screamers’. These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sad and dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with the saws and axes and watch … They [the screamers] are their own tombstones and their own mourners. (Carr 1966: 132–33)
The juxtaposition of the beloved sky with the trees helps us to enter the tragedy John 3:16–21 depicts. God gives God’s self in love to the world; people love the darkness more than the light. John’s story of God’s self-giving love centres on the gift of Jesus scorned in crucifixion. His Gospel narrative is not once upon a time. It is recurring. John’s Jesus calls his followers to follow him into the midst of it (John 13:12–17; 15:9–21; 17:18–23).
Carr portrays a tragedy of scorned love. Continuing environmental degradation has only deepened the tragedy. How does John’s story of divine self-giving invite us to engage this tragedy and to receive and practise God’s gifts of love and life?
References
Carr, Emily. 1966. Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin)