The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland

Imagine painting with mosquitos thick as fur on your hands. Or standing in a deserted village of silence, surrounded by trees with ancient coffins splitting apart. Or staring up at 60-foot totem poles carved with Eagles, Ravens, Bears and Whales trying to communicate their message. Or being scrutinized by a 20-foot ogress—Dzunukwa—with nipples carved into Eagles’ heads with eyes and beaks. In The Forest Lover, Susan Vreeland gives us more than a biography of the painter Emily Carr. She gives us an unforgettable experience.
Leaving the loneliness of the Pacific Northwest, Emily Carr goes to Paris to see and learn Impressionism. The description of her changes in painting style—including trading “female” watercolors for the more advanced medium of oil—is so intense that the reader can feel the paint piled on the canvas This reader could not resist looking down at her hands, expecting to see red mixed with deep violet and sun-stroked cadmium yellow.
Emily Carr is the kind of person I would have loved to know as a friend. A rebel, she befriends Native American women, some who have lost their children to the white man’s legacy of Small Pox and other diseases, attends an outlawed (by the Canadian government) Potlatch ritual and comes close to taking a fur trapper as a lover as she is seduced by the feel of the mink furs lining the floor of his tent. And anyone who has ever loved a dog will understand the type of person the artist was. Snubbed by art patrons she nevertheless continues to document the totem poles that are being sold by non-Natives and bravely enters villages emptied by government “relocations” of the Native population in order to do so.
This is a book about the artist, Emily Carr, but also about art, women, and government greed, powerful men who are able to decimate populations when the Missionaries fail.

A fascinating story about a relatively unknown artist and the treatment of Canadian Indians in the early 1900's.  Her descriptions of the forests made you feel you were there.