Book Excerpt

A Life of Emily Carr Ian Dejardin The artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) is a revered household name and feminist icon not only in British Columbia, where she was born and lived, but also throughout Canada. Carr is loved for her highly individual art that is imbued with her powerful personality—a personality that continues to project vividly across the seventy years since her death, through her paintings, her photo- materialgraphs and her writing. She chose compelling subject matter for her art, pursued her vocation with rigour, passion and determination, often against considerable odds, and was a brave and intrepid traveller. Yet, as was the case with the subjects of the first Painting Canada exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2011—Tom Thomson and the artists known as the Group of Seven1—Canada has hugged her fame to itself. Carr is little known out- side her native country, particularly in Europe.2 She is also unfortunately saddled with an image that sticks to her like glue: that of a formidable, large, irascible and sharp-tongued old eccentric in a voluminous homemade smock and a hairnet, stumping through her hometown of Victoria pushing a pram full of pets. There is no denying that Emily Carr’s parents, Richard Carr and Emily Saunders Carr, in studio, c. 1876. Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, she was a devoted animal lover (p. 33); at various times she owned dozens BC Archives, image A-09184. Copyrighted of dogs (she bred Old English sheepdogs and kept griffons), a famous monkey - (Woo), an equally famous white rat (Susie), parrots, a cockatoo, a crow and many, many other pets.3 Photographs do exist of the young Emily Carr, yet it is the image of the older woman that is imprinted on the Canadian con- sciousness, typically comprising a basilisk stare (she hated being photo- graphed) and often the current favoured dog wielded like a protective shield. To a British audience, this stereotype might seem remarkably familiar: here ONLY surely is a classic English battleaxe, suggesting an amalgam of Beatrix Potter with Ena Sharples, Margaret Rutherford and Barbara Woodhouse.4 For someone so proud of being a Canadian, Carr could indeed appear very English: to people in Toronto, for instance, she sounded English, and at art school in San Francisco she records that “I was not English but I was nearer English than any of the others. I had English ways, English speech, 5 Emily Carr and her sisters; clockwise from bottom right: from my English parents though I was born and bred Canadian.” Her par- Emily, Alice, Lizzie, Edith and Clara, c. 1888. Photograph by Skene Lowe. Courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC ents were indeed English immigrants, albeit via California. Photographs of Archives, image A-02037. Opposite PREVIEW Harold Mortimer Lamb, Emily Carr in Her Studio, 1939. Silver gelatin print, 7 × 6 cm. 18 Title 19 Promised gift to the Vancouver Art Gallery from Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft. her magnificently bearded father, Richard, her mother, Emily, and the home craved comfort and reassurance and ecstasy in religion; but her comment that they built in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, suggest a family striving also suggests a veiled criticism of Harris’s work (p. 27). to be “more English than the English” in the classic colonial way. Carr’s older On the subject of her painting, Carr’s language is often Whitmanesque sisters fitted the bill too, if the regular use of the dread signifier “prim” to and euphoric; like Harris, she saw landscape as a revelation of the divine in describe them is anything to go by. All in all, there was a lot of oppressive nature. She talks of air, space and light as almost living entities. The great Victorian stereotyping for a natural rebel to set her face against. Nonetheless, trees of the West Coast rainforest that she painted—her own quasi-totems— Carr was clearly taken aback when one of the personal revelations of the seemed to her to vibrate with life force. Occasionally, prompted presumably years she spent in England turned out to be the affirmation of her solidly by the Indigenous art that she so often painted, she would find in a gnarled Overhead, p. 265. Canadian identity. She had nothing against “country England,” as she put tree trunk the likeness of some mythical snarling animal, prefiguring the Graham Sutherland, Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods, it: “It was London & the English worship of traditions that riled me.”6 1940. Oil on canvas, 78.7 × 107.9 cm. Tate, London. later, more overtly surrealist vision of British artists such as Paul Nash or Rebelliousness is one of the keys to Carr’s character, and to her self-image; Graham Sutherland. Sometimes, too, her attempts to express the life she saw the latter is particularly important in Carr’s case because, after a lifetime of in the inanimate led her perilously close to the cartoonish; there are fail- struggle as an artist, her last five years saw her achieve an unexpected fame materialures, something of which she was agonizingly conscious. as the author of a series of autobiographical books in which her feistiness, Carr’s numerous pictures of scenes of logging devastation can perhaps be her humour, her intelligence and the sheer force of her personality simply interpreted as an expression of spiritual loss allied to her sense (commonly leap off the page. Perhaps no more than the rest of us, but to a more articu- held at the time) of the inevitable fading of First Nations culture, which casts late degree, she had a tendency in these stories to self-mythologize, occasion- an interesting shade of meaning on a famous image such as Scorned as ally not letting mere facts or accurate dates get in the way of a good story. Timber, Beloved of the Sky (p. 279). In her images of totem poles she often, She is a biographer’s dream (so much revealing information!) and nightmare through vivid colour and a focus on the expression of the eyes, seems to (not all of it reliable!) combined; but the self that emerges from these stories suggest that the symbolic creatures are in some way alive, despite their dilap- is a powerful construct, one that has occupied Canadian scholars for decades. idation and neglect (Totemic Figure in the Forest, p. 168); and her images Equally important for understanding Emily Carr is an appreciation of of the regeneration of the forest surely say something similar about rebirth her sense of spirituality. Carr often wrote about the powerful aura of spirit and hope. that she sensed in First Nations art. In her autobiography, Growing Pains, Her profound appreciation for the glories of creation did not always she shares her soul-searching interest in comparative religions, though her Copyrighted extend to her fellow human beings. For nearly fifteen years, from 1913 to upbringing had been solidly Presbyterian—indeed, indigestibly so: “I was - 1927, Carr was a landlady in a boarding house that she had built to help her rebellious about religion. In our home it was forced upon you in large, furi- achieve a regular income. This was a role to which she was, to an almost ous helps . Then too there was the missionary blight. My second sister comical degree, unsuited—or so the very funny but sad stories in her book wanted to be a Missionary and filled our house with long-faced samples . The House of All Sorts (1944) would have us believe. Often rejected and disre- Sea Drift at the Edge of the Forest, c. 1931. Oil on canvas. There was the Sunday School blight too. That was very bad.”7 Encountering, spected as an artist by her hometown public in Victoria, she lets us think as she later did, someone who practised the Baha’i faith (the American artist that she gave up art altogether during those years, but this was not the case. Mark Tobey) and several people who practised theosophy (in particular herONLY Carr carried on exhibiting and even painting when she could find the time friend the artist Lawren Harris), she wrestled long and hard with alternative throughout that period, though not to the prolific level of which she was religions—paying special attention to theosophy, which was experiencing capable when in the grip of enthusiasm. Although her art may not always something of a heyday—before falling back on the comfort of her rather tra- have been understood, her status as an artist of note was probably less under ditional Christian faith: “When I tried to see things theosophically I was dispute in her hometown than she would have us believe—or possibly even looking through the glasses of cold, hard, inevitable fate, serene perhaps but than she believed, a certain paranoia being omnipresent in her self-aware- cold, unjoyous and unmoving.”8 Cold serenity was never her thing—she ness as an artist. She recognized, later in life, that there had been many 20 PREVIEW 21 opportunities that she had simply not been willing to take advantage of: she tive, not a record at all. It was essentially a case of mutual incomprehension. found it hard to meet success halfway. Carr had gone to France precisely to acquire a radical new expressive visual Rebelliousness may also have had something to do with her relationship language that would allow her to do justice to what she saw as Canada’s equiv- with Indigenous people. Her attitudes inevitably retained much that was alent of England’s Stonehenge. To her, a merely accurate record didn’t say colonial and patronizing—it would be too much to expect her to be otherwise anything true about the objects.

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