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

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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)

See full exhibition for John 3:16–21

John 3:16–21

Revised Standard Version

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. 18He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. 21But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.