Creativity Quote by Emily Carr

Carr’s advice is bracing because it refuses the fantasy of artistic certainty. She frames experimentation not as a preliminary phase you “graduate” from, but as the permanent weather of making: you try, you miss, you adjust, you keep moving. The line “you will not be sure of what you are doing” lands like a corrective to every tidy narrative of genius, where inspiration arrives fully formed and the artist simply transcribes it. Carr insists the opposite: doubt is not evidence of fraudulence; it’s proof you’re actually working.

The subtext is permission, but also discipline. “You will have to” is a gentle mandate: no mentor, manifesto, or technique can spare you the vulnerable part where your taste outpaces your skill and the result feels wrong. Carr doesn’t romanticize that gap; she normalizes it. “That’s all right” isn’t consolation so much as instruction for staying in the room. The phrase “feeling your way” is tactically physical. It implies art as navigation in partial light, where touch and intuition matter as much as planning.

Context sharpens the intent. Carr came up in a period that policed women’s ambition and treated serious modernist experimentation as suspect, especially outside the metropolitan centers. Her own work, shaped by West Coast landscapes and encounters with Indigenous village sites (through a colonial lens), often pushed against the soft decorum expected of “respectable” painting. This quote reads like a field note from that struggle: progress doesn’t arrive as confidence; it arrives as contact.