It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she’s something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.
You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning...
So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
Up came the sun, and drank the dew.
Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.
I sat staring, staring, staring – half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.
When you really think about your hand you begin to realize its connection, to sense the hum of your own being passing through it. When we look at a piece of the universe we should feel the same.
Art is an aspect of God and there is only one God, but different people see Him in different ways. Though He is always the same He doesn’t always look the same...
Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!
You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.