Emily Carr; my kind of woman

Emily Carr is among Canada’s best loved painters and her lush mystical pictures of West Coast rain forests and totems are known around the world. Success didn’t come easily or quickly for Emily, however. She was 70, and still quite obscure, when doctors, considering it too arduous for her failing health, told her to stop painting. Indefatigable, Emily took up writing. She put words on paper as attractively as paint on canvas, and promptly found success as a wordsmith. Her first book, a collection of stories entitled Klee Wyck (The Laughing One, a name from her Indian friends) was an instant hit and won a Governor General’s Award for fiction. She wrote six more books and her reputation as a painter finally flourished. Emily Carr was born in Victoria, BC, in 1871. She had four sisters and four brothers, three of whom died in infancy. Emily’s father, Richard, was a successful shopkeeper, but cold and autocratic. Victoria, more English than England, suited Richard Carr perfectly. He bought land on the city’s outskirts, conquered the wilderness on his property and grew an English country garden in its stead. Life was idyllic; Emily loved animals, nature, and open spaces. When she was 12, however, her mother died, perhaps of a broken heart. Two years later, the children were orphaned when Richard Carr passed away. At 16, the brave and determined Emily moved to San Francisco to study art; she stayed for five years. Back home, Emily taught art to children and visited Ucluelet, an Indian village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, for the first time. The natives’ artistic style, way of life, spirituality, and reverence for the natural world struck a cord with Emily that resonated for the rest of her life. She said, “Their sensitivities to design was magnificent; the originality and power of their art forceful, grand, and built on a solid foundation, being taken from the very core of life itself.” Restless and eager to improve, Emily eventually went to London, England to study further. She hated the bustling, dirty city immediately, but remained in Europe steadfastly searching for the elusive catalyst or epiphany that would make sense of her desires and talents. After five years in Europe, Emily returned to Victoria again. She and three unmarried sisters split up the property and built their own homes. Emily was 45 years old and thought that having tenants would allow her to pay taxes, eat, paint, and be happy. Life can blindside the best of us, however, and World War I reduced rental rates and increased expenses. Keeping tenants and a menagerie of animals warm and comfortable was consuming. For the next 15 long years Emily Carr scarcely painted. A hard working, cigarette- smoking, unmarried landlady, who had studied painting abroad and went about with a pet monkey, cut a terrific swath through conservative Victoria. The House of All Sorts, a collection of short essays on her inartistic years as an unlikely proprietor, is a treasure trove of insights. The painter could certainly write. It’s easy to imagine the “landlady years” were torturous for Emily Carr. She wanted to paint – she loved to – but for many reasons couldn’t pick up a brush. She was, by her own admission, sensitive to criticism and her art had been scorned and ridiculed by Victorians who wanted pretty reproductions: nothing deeper. Emily would have none of it. “I’d rather starve,” she said. Carr was more interested in capturing the essence of the thing; she painted what she felt more than what she saw. All-seeing eyes were large and exaggerated on native totem poles, after all, and beaver teeth and thatched tails were prominently inflated. “Great art must have more than fine workmanship behind it,” she said and remained faithful to her style. Emily Carr spent a lot of time alone in the old growth forests of Vancouver Island; awed by beauty, humbled by the solemnity and dignity of trees, and inspired by the magnanimity of it all. She said of the forest, “Life is in the soil. Nothing is dead, not even a corpse. It moves into the elements when the spirit has left it, but even to the spirits leaving, there is life, boundless life, restless and marvellous, fresh and clean. God.” There is a menacing element to some of her pictures. Tall majestic cedars that had never known a lumber industry were doomed to be hacked down and converted to paper money. Emily lamented, “… the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws. It’s a horrible sight to see a tree felled.” It’s as though the spirits and trees had recognised their fate and Emily, sensing their wrath and sadness, painted it. Word of her canvasses made it to Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery in Ottawa. He visited the landlady and asked to see her work. He liked it and invited her east for a show. Emily, now 56, travelled to Toronto with some of her canvases. She met members of the Group of Seven; Lawren Harris, in particular. Carr was awed by Harris’s paintings. Harris was kind to Emily, praising her work and inviting her to his home. It changed her life. With Harris’s blessings and encouragement, Emily returned to the west with a new determination to paint. “I had a dream of greenery… In my dream that hillside suddenly lived – weighted with sap, burning green in every leaf, every scrap of it vital. Woods, that had always meant so much to me, from that moment meant so much more.” Vancouver Island’s dense tropical cedar jungles were summoning and she responded. Emily went back to the woods until a bad heart made her stop painting. She started writing, however, and the rest is history. Just as hard work and perseverance rarely go unpunished, cream eventually rises and goes out on top. Emily Carr passed away in 1945, an honourable artist.

Image courtesy of Toronto Public Library.