Creativity Quote by Emily Carr

Carr’s “grandness of Canada” isn’t a postcard compliment; it’s a demand for an unmediated encounter with place. “In the raw” is the key phrase: it rejects the tidy, touristic Canada being packaged in her era and insists on something rough, wet, overwhelming - the kind of landscape that doesn’t flatter human plans. As an artist, Carr is also talking about method. She’s arguing for seeing before naming, feeling before composing: the discipline of getting close enough to the world that it can still unsettle you.

The subtext is quietly oppositional. Early-20th-century Canadian culture leaned hard on national identity myths - wilderness as wholesome backdrop, nature as proof of destiny, scenery as property. Carr’s line slices against that domestication. Grandness here isn’t patriotic triumph; it’s scale that shrinks you. The wonder is less “Isn’t this ours?” than “How am I supposed to live next to this?”

Context matters: Carr painted the forests and coastal environments of British Columbia while also engaging (and being shaped by, and controversially representing) Indigenous cultures and carved forms. “In the raw” can read as her hunger for what she perceived as older, less industrial, less “civilized” forms - a modernist craving that risks romanticizing and simplifying. That tension is part of why the sentence lands. It captures the exhilaration of being undone by a place while hinting at the era’s larger project: turning that undoing into art, and then into a story a country tells about itself.