"Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul"
About this Quote
Carr is drawing a hard border around authenticity, and it isn’t the soft, Instagrammable kind. “Be careful” lands like a studio warning: not a plea for self-expression, but a demand for artistic jurisdiction. She’s policing the source of the work. If it doesn’t come from what you “know in your own soul,” it’s not just derivative; it’s a kind of trespass.
The phrasing is tellingly proprietary: “your own,” repeated, with “soul” as the final credential. For an artist who lived in a Canada busy inventing itself culturally, that insistence reads as both aesthetic doctrine and ethical boundary. Carr painted landscapes and Indigenous village sites at a time when non-Indigenous artists routinely treated Indigenous culture as raw material for national mythmaking. Her line can be heard as self-interrogation: where does observation end and taking begin? What do you earn the right to depict, and what do you merely have access to?
It also pushes back against the era’s imported standards. Early 20th-century artists were surrounded by European movements and colonial taste-makers; the temptation was to paint “like” something already sanctioned. Carr’s advice refuses that external approval economy. The work has to be metabolized, not borrowed - lived through the nerves, not copied from the eye.
There’s an ascetic edge here, too. She’s describing discipline: the artist’s job is not to decorate the world with cleverness, but to translate inner knowledge into form and accept the loneliness of that constraint.
The phrasing is tellingly proprietary: “your own,” repeated, with “soul” as the final credential. For an artist who lived in a Canada busy inventing itself culturally, that insistence reads as both aesthetic doctrine and ethical boundary. Carr painted landscapes and Indigenous village sites at a time when non-Indigenous artists routinely treated Indigenous culture as raw material for national mythmaking. Her line can be heard as self-interrogation: where does observation end and taking begin? What do you earn the right to depict, and what do you merely have access to?
It also pushes back against the era’s imported standards. Early 20th-century artists were surrounded by European movements and colonial taste-makers; the temptation was to paint “like” something already sanctioned. Carr’s advice refuses that external approval economy. The work has to be metabolized, not borrowed - lived through the nerves, not copied from the eye.
There’s an ascetic edge here, too. She’s describing discipline: the artist’s job is not to decorate the world with cleverness, but to translate inner knowledge into form and accept the loneliness of that constraint.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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