An Amazing PERRLA Customer
A Great Undisclosed Institution
“…like and old tree with no others round to strengthen it against the buffets…”
(Shadbolt, 1979, p. 14)
EMILY CARR1
Emily Carr was one of Canada’s finest National abstract expressionist painters and without dispute the most famous of painters from British Columbia. However, during her life she was primarily isolated and admonished from her community and garnered little support or notoriety until late into her career. Carr only became commercially recognized the last two years of her life and most of her success and popularity was posthumously. Today she is the most recognized BC abstract expressionist artist who is known for her ability to demonstrate her profound love of the spirit and form of the natural landscape through art, primarily the First Nation’s and West Coast Forests.
Background and History of Emily Carr.
Emily Carr was born in Victoria, BC on December 16, 1871 and died March 2, 1945 a few blocks from her native home where she spent most of her life. At the time Victoria was geographically and politically separated from Canada and the rest of the world. The Gold rush of the 50-60’s helped to make Victoria a bustling frontier town, but by 1871 its’ notoriety had died off and Vancouver had become B.C.’s vital centre. It was during this time when art was recognized an acceptable past time and not a vital role in culture or as a career, which Carr was born into. Carr was considered obstinate from the start and did not conform to the popular religious and authoritarian nature of society at that time. Her father was the religious and authoritarian leader of the household and her mother was a delicate but sympathetic supporter. Carr was born sixth out of the seven children born to the Carr household and the youngest of four sisters. None of her brothers survived into adulthood. Millie (as she was known to her family) showed an early interest in drawing and while not discouraged by her family was primarily left to her own, she fashioned her own easel from twigs, that she set up in her bedroom (Shadbolt, 1979, p. 21). Carr’s father openly and scathingly criticized Carr for being coarse and her unladylike opposition to societal standards. Because of this open animosity Carr developed an intense hatred of her father that lasted into his death. Carr’s life might have taken a dramatically different course had her Emily’s sympathetic mother not passed away when she was 14 years old and her dominating father a mere two years later. Her eldest sister Edith took over the family leader and partially to escape her controlling sister, Carr persuaded her guardian that she was serious about art and that he should fund her to attend the California School of Art and Design in San Francisco, California.
Emily’s first art training was described as “not much of a school but as a place where artists went to start” (Shadbolt, 1979, p. 23). Carr returned to Victoria in 1893, with her humdrum and unemotional watercolours and sketches from this time. She remained close with her family especially her sisters Lizzie and Alice, but as they were unsupportive of her artistic and unladylike endeavors, she planned to leave as soon as she could to further her training. Carr taught art classes to children, but as soon as she could afford it enrolled in the Westminster School of Art in England, where she attended in the fall 1899. Carr studied for two years in England but describes this time as depression and unproductive partially due to the fact that she became quite ill and spent the last 18 months in a sanatorium. Despite her hospitalization she actively wrote and later her writings were put forth in her first book entitled “Pause” (Shadbolt, 1979, p. 26).
Carr returned in 1904 to Victoria and then onto Vancouver where she was determined to live out her dreams as an artist. She was offered a teaching job at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art, where she worked until 1910. She was quite artistically productive during this time and produced many watercolours of the surrounding landscape and forests. Her interest in the Indian art probably developed from her interest in the people, who unlike popular society lived off the beaten track and like Carr, rejected the narrow values of society so prominent at the time. Initially she sketched and chronicled village scenes and only later came to focus on monumental sculptures of Totem poles in 1912, when her artistic goals became clarified (Shadbolt, 1979, p. 28). Carr’s focus on Native art gave her moral and social support and provided her with the impetus and focus to continue her art despite common adversity.
In 1910 Carr traveled to France to find out about the new, “Modern Art” (Thom, 2013, p. 7). In France, Carr learned to paint en pleine air (on location in the open air) and was encouraged to use Fauve or non-naturalistic colours which were artistic influences from Matisse and Derain (Thom, 2013, p. 10). Carr returned home in 1912 keen to explore her new “Modern” techniques and undertook several ambitious sketching trips to interior of BC and the Queen Charlotte Islands. She completed sketches and paintings in water colours and oils to document remote Indian villages and totems that she feared were destined to disappear along B.C’s West Coast. However, she received little support for her paintings 1912-1927 and the Victorians attempted to ban Carr and her “Modern” art and refused to re-hire as a teacher and to display her work publicly. In financial desperation, Carr was forced to open a boarding house to keep herself afloat but limited her time for her art production.
A turning point in her career occurred in 1927. Carr was asked to provide artwork for a traveling exhibition put on by the National Gallery of Ottawa titled “West Coast Art: Native & Modern”, to which she contributed 22 of her paintings, pottery and textiles and some of her writings (Thom, 2013, p. 11). Carr went to Ottawa and Toronto to travel with the show and met with the now famous Group of Seven. This connection with other artists that finally embraced and supported Carr as one of their own, that helped her to focus her own spiritual and visual journey. She became friends with Lawren Harris which allowed Carr to be able to finally discuss matters of art and spirit with someone who both valued and respected Carr as a fellow artist. This support and encouragement from other artists sparked a rich and creative time for Carr. She returned to home and was encouraged to take even more artistic risks after studying with the Seattle based modern cubist Mark Tobey. Tobey’s focus was on simple form and shape and this new focus is apparent in her work from this time on.
After several lengthy stays in First Nation villages, Carr became too ill to travel and live in the open she purchased and lived in a Caravan that she called the “Elephant” in the forests skirting Victoria, on Vancouver Island with her pet monkey, three dogs, a parrot and a rat. She perfected her technique of painting with oil thinned with gasoline on paper to allow her a light weight, portable medium to complete more detailed and quick drying paintings en pleine air. Unfortunately, Carr’s health continued to deteriorate after a stroke and then two subsequent heart attacks and she was forced to give up her sketching and painting en pleine air. She then turned her attention to writing, and producing oil paintings from sketches she had completed earlier in her career. As her health worsened, Carr was almost completely curtailed from painting and she focused more on her writing. She published a second book of native stories called “Klee Wyck”, named after her given Haida name of “Laughing One” for which she won the Governor General’s award for Literature in 1941 (Thom, 2013, p. 13).
Carr passed away in March of 1945 at the age of seventy four. Just prior to her death she had put aside fourty–five paintings in trust and these became the core of the Emily Carr Trust at the Vancouver Art Gallery. A memorial exhibition was also organized in October of that year at the Toronto Art Gallery which had kept much of her work safe during the war. While Carr commercially success and notoriety was for primarily at first for her work as writer (5/7 of her novels were published after her death) and then secondarily as a painter, her notoriety was based on the ability to reflect the “profound beauty of nature and… an almost uncanny ability to capture both the form and the essence of the forest or landscape” (Thom, 2013, p. 15) despite common and lasting adversity at the time to her artistic form.
Impressions of the Artist & Art as Therapeutic.
Emily Carr is an inspiration for me and as she persisted with her art form despite considerable adversity at a time as a career choice for women and as her work diverged radically from the accepted body of art produced at the time. Despite limited support in all forms, Carr was able to find her spiritual and true self through her connection with First Nations people and her sensitivity and love for the West Coast of British Columbia. She was an “effective innovator in an almost totally unsympathetic B.C” (Harper, 1969, p. 307). She struggled against convention and lived her life through her art. She was able to project “great emotional powers in National art … few landscape painters have wrought such dramatic images from earth and sky” (Duval, 1972, p. 29). Carr never fit in with conventional society connected instantly with First Nations people, “she instinctively loved and understood these people” (Harper, 1969, p. 309) and she responded to their simple lives and religious beliefs expressed in their Totemic symbolism which spoke to her and to which she could relate through the shared language of art.
In the words of Otto Rank, Carr was “one of those artists who live themselves out completely in their work” (Shadbolt, 1979, p. 15). Carr was able to find the sources for her art work in the deepest part of her. Art was her friend, her confidant, her spirit and her emotional outlet when she was ostracized from the community. Through her art and her relationship with the First Nation’s people, Carr was able to make sense of her own religious beliefs that she could express through her art in a similar manner to these indigenous people. I feel these quotes epitomize how art was therapeutic for Carr, “She painted the forest as if it were alive. She poured all her feelings into wonder at nature in her native province” (Harper, 2005, p. 310) and “her art was a pursuit to find an image of her own soul in the landscape of her native B.C.” (Duval, 1972, p. 32).
References
Duval, P. (1972). Four decades - The Canadian Group of Painters and their contemporaries 1930-1970. Toronto, ON and Vancouver, BC, Canada: Clarke, Irwin .
Harper, J. R. (1969). Painting in Canada. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto.
Murray, J. (2004). The birth of the modern: Post-Impressionism in Canadian art c. 1900-1920. Oshawa, ON, Canada: The Robert McLaughlin Gallery.
Shadbolt, D. (1979). The art of Emily Carr. Toronto, ON and Vancouver, BC, Canada: Clarke, Irwin and Douglas & McIntrye.
Thom, I. M. (2013). Emily Carr: Collected. Madeira Park, BC & Vancouver, BC, Canada: Vancouver Art Gallery and Douglas & MacIntyre.
White, C., & Campbell, C. (1988). Esso Resources’ Canadian art collections: Historical selections 1779-1962. Calgary, AB, Canada: Esso Resources Canada.