In these pages, she records her conversations with herself, her thoughts about her art and her search for a meaning in life. We witness her frequent anger and guilt towards family, neighbours and colleagues, her emotional life of alternate elation and depression, and her frustration at the struggle to earn a living as a landlady while attempting to be an ambitious modern painter in a provincial town. The journals provide a fascinating window into the personality and subjective experience of an artist and human being. Their stream of consciousness reveals Carr’s search not for peace but for vitality, for a sense of life as change and movement. The journals also reveal her intense appetite for connection — to the surrounding world of nature, so lavish on the Northwest Coast, and to the more difficult world of human relationships. They show how she sublimated these longings into art through bold orchestrations of visual form and through striking prose poetry, as well as through explorations of an eclectic new language of religion emerging in her time.
