Eileen in front of the Emily Carr House

Settee, Emily Carr House

Parlour, Emily Carr House

Jan Ross was generous with her knowledge and time. I’d known that Emily Carr was a published author, but not that she’d first gained widespread fame and recognition for her vivid and beautifully written books. Carr’s “word sketches” (her name for the kind of writing she did) reached millions of listeners when read aloud on CBC public radio, subsequently spurring great interest in her paintings.

Emily, who kept journals and created sketchpads throughout her life, starting writing when she could no longer paint due to chronic and significant health problems primarily related to her heart. In fact, all of her great writing was done from her sick bed. She was 70 years old when her first book Klee Wyck was published. An evocative work that describes in arresting detail her experiences amount First Nations people and cultures on British Columbia’s west coast, the book won the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 1941.

Books written by Emily Carr, or collections based on archival material

The Book of Small, published in 1942 by Oxford University Press, is a collection of thirty-six word sketches in which she relates anecdotes about her life and times as a girl growing up in what was then the frontier town of Victoria. The last book published during her lifetime is titled The House of All Sorts: heartfelt, heartbreaking, and humorous stories about the trials of being a landlady in a small apartment house she built as a source of income to support herself as she pursued her creative calling. Right around the corner from the Emily Carr House, the building still stands to this day.

The House of All Sorts

As my husband and I toured the Emily Carr House and Gardens, Emily Carr’s presence was felt in reproductions of her paintings, passages from her books, furnishings from the time period, artifacts that once belonged to the Carr family, and sepia tone photographs of Emily, her parents and her four sisters.

The Breakfast Room

In February 1945, with no specific complaint except weariness, Emily checked into the newly opened St. Mary’s Priory nursing home in Victoria. Biographer Paula Blanchard writes, “Although she had another show in mind and unpublished manuscripts next to her bed, all her major work was done. “I used to wonder,” she once wrote to her closest friend Ira Dilworth, “what people who were facing death thought about it. They seldom mentioned it and I often wished they would. (We are rather cowardly about that thing.) Now I look at it very much as I used to look … on going out into the woods in the van in the old days, busying myself in the preparation of leaving things as straight as I can, and leaving the new camp to be itself when I get there.” On 2 March 1945, in the middle of the afternoon, she got there.

Indian Church, Emily Carr, 1929

Final note: Inscribed on her simple tombstone in Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria:

EMILY CARTER, 1871 – 1945
ARTIST AND AUTHOR
LOVER OF NATURE

A few hours later, at the entrance to the Victoria’s Empress Hotel (where Emily often endured ‘high tea’ with her parents and four sisters), Emily herself greeted us, or so it seemed, sketch pad in hand. Emily’s Javanese monkey ‘Woo’ perches on her shoulder. Her beloved purebred Bobtail sheepdog ‘Billie’ stands nearby.

Barbara Paterson, sculptor, Emily Carr, 2010

Cast in bronze, the commissioned statue is a masterful rendering of this visionary artist who captured the coastal forest landscape, generally around her Victoria home, in a way previously unseen in British Columbian art.

Over the next three days, Ralph and I walked the paths Emily once walked:  along the Victoria waterfront, through Beacon Hill Park where wild peacocks roam, past Parliament buildings, and totem poles and First Nations monuments in Thunderbird Park.

Eileen viewing totem poles, Thunderbird Park, Victoria, BC

While viewing the First Nations collection in the Royal British Columbia Museum we came face-to-face with two and three-dimensional representations of the history, art, and culture of the people to whom Emily Carr paid homage in her paintings and writings.

Documentary photo, First Nations Gallery, RBCM, Victoria

Totem pole, First Nations gallery, RBCM, Victoria

On her many—often solo—travels to Native villages in and around the northern part of Vancouver Island, Emily discovered how closely the Indians were linked not only to their traditions but to nature itself: their lives were regulated by the tides and seasons as well as by the myths that surround their guardian spirits. For her, an outsider, nature and tradition were memorably combined in “the great stillness, the solemn old grey poles towering above the tent, the shorter mortuary columns crowed with their crusted coffins, the water softly lapping the pebbly beach, & the sullen roar of the distant surf.”

According to biographer Maria Tippet, in these deserted villages Carr was able to experience the wholeness that she sought all her life: everything was part of everything else.

Big Eagle, Skidigate BC, Emily Carr, oil on paper, 1930

Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr was the name of the major exhibition of Emily Carr’s work at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Carr was an early and ardent environmentalist who championed the preservation of old-growth forests she portrayed in her work. Among her most famous is Above the Gravel Pit.

Above the Gravel Pit, oil on paper, 1936

About this haunting painting art critic Andrew Hunter writes in “Clear Cut,” an essay: “More boldly even than her scenes of heavily-logged terrain, the gravel pit expresses the dramatic transformation taking place around Carr: the steady growth of Victoria and its methodical encroachment on the surrounding landscape … Not a virgin wilderness but a space transformed and scarred by human presence and industry.”

While in Victoria, I was reminded that Carr had years of formal art training in British Columbia, San Francisco, London, and Paris. She began her artistic career as an art teacher. She converted the barn at her family home into an art studio in 1894 where she taught art to children. Later, in 1906, she moved to Vancouver to start a job as an art teacher at the Vancouver Studio Club and School of Art, but left to open her own studio and to teach children’s art classes. Carr dabbled in a variety of styles prevalent in the early 20th century, such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. She was not, by any means, a self-taught child prodigy.

Months later and back in Minneapolis, I still smile when I think about how Carr travelled around Vancouver Island sketching and painting landscapes in a caravan outfitted for herself and her companion animals, a caravan she named “The Elephant.”

And then, from time to time I think about how incredibly interesting it would have been to travel with her.

Patricia Morley, Emily Carr and Her Caravan at the South-west End of Esquimate Lagoon, 1934

Middle school students at Vancouver Art Gallery

Art is our memory of love. The most an artist can do through their work is say, let me show what I have seen, what I have loved, and perhaps you will love it too.

— Annie Bevan

In the weeks before traveling to British Columbia to see two major exhibitions of paintings by Emily Carr—one of Canada’s most celebrated and fascinating artists—I read and researched everything I could about her.

Emily Carr Books

Born in 1874 in Victoria, British Columbia, she lived a complex life filled with tension between conventions of society and her own originality, between happiness and despair, within her personal relationships, and an often lonely struggle to overcome obstacles, both real and self-inflicted.

Biographer Paula Blanchard writes: “Fiercely independent and defiantly individualistic, Emily Carr was considered an eccentric by the society around her. Working largely in isolation, without the influence of strong women artists to look to, and years ahead of the art of her time and place, Carr demolished some traditionally cherished notions about women artists.” (And she did so, I might add, at great cost to her physical and emotional well-being.)

Emily Carr self-portrait

Carr was also a defiant Victorian, drawn to the deep forest and the open sky; an early recorder of Northwest Coast monumental art; a painter, writer, and humorist; a daughter, sister, friend; a student, teacher, mentor; a landlady, animal lover, and dog breeder. And, of personal interest to me as my next birthday approaches, a critically renowned painter whose talents would only fully emerge in her late 50s, a popular and award-winning writer first published at age 70.

In last week’s blog post I raised the question that I’d asked myself long before my husband and I entered the “Emily Carr: Into the Forest” exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery: “Will the artist’s great, swirling images of the mighty forests of the Pacific Northwest, which no one before or since has painted as she did, be all that I imagined them to be?”

Absolutely.

Eileen standing next to Tree Trunk, 1931, oil on canvas, at Vancouver Art Gallery

Seeing her forest paintings from the 1930s, both canvases and oil on paper works, three key early works completed during 1913–1918, and the remarkable, Grey, 1929-1930, quickly confirmed that the two-dimensional color plates of her work that I’d seen before only in books were inadequate representations of the vibrant colors, rich texture, bold brushstrokes, and spiritual aliveness I encountered in the originals displayed

 Unlike my husband Ralph—who’d had only a passing knowledge about Emily Carr before our trip—my study of Carr’s life informed my deep appreciation of the work I was seeing, the sometimes raw, sometimes tender, emotions and deep spirituality depicted within each frame: anger, fear, joy, awe, reverence, innocence.

A Rushing Undergrowth, Emily Carr, 1935

Ralph described his experience to me: “Standing in front of more than one original Emily Carr painting, I got a sensation that the trees and undergrowth in the painting were actually moving.  I don’t know how she achieved that effect, but it was palpable.”

Of this effect, so intense as to seem almost tangible, Emily Carr herself once said, “I figure a picture equals movement in space. Pictures have swerved too much toward design and decoration. The idea must run through the whole, the story that arrested you and urged that desire to express it, the story that God told you through that combination of growth … There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit …”

Or, as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “An artist chooses his subjects: that is the way he praises.”

What I do know is, that after “going into the forest” of Emily Carr’s magnificent paintings, I would never see a tree, moss, or any aspect of the natural world in the same way, be it in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, or in my own backyard.

Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, with Ralph in front of tree

Sun Yat-Sen Garden three, Vancouver

My invitation to do so appeared on the front page of the New York Times Travel Section on October 2, 2017, with the headline: “Vancouver Island, Through an Artist’s Eyes.” Beneath an intriguing photo of a trail into a Pacific Coast rainforest, the feature’s first line revealed the artist’s identity. “Revered in British Columbia, little known in the U.S., the artist Emily Carr, born in Victoria in 1871, may be from another era, but amid environmental concerns, her works and images resonate.”

Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1930

I’d been introduced to Emily’s Carr’s ground-breaking work in a Canadian Literature class taught by poet Deborah Keenan at Hamline University in 2004. Emily Carr: An Introduction of Her Life and Art by Anne Newlands was one of the assigned texts. The book was only 64 pages long, yet the color plates of this unconventional woman’s paintings spoke to me in a way no other visual artist’s work ever had.

I couldn’t articulate why. All I knew was that these images—created by an artist who nicknamed herself ‘Small’ as a child—brought to life a hidden part of me, raw and tender, foreign, yet totally familiar. Later, when I researched and read more about Carr’s life, she became a kind of imaginary friend, a kindred spirit much like I’ve always felt about the Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Emily Carr (Small, 1876)

The Times article highlighted two major exhibitions of Carr’s art: “Emily Carr: Into the Forest” (at the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 13 – December 3, 2017), and “Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr” at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (June 10 – April 1, 2018). The window of time in which to see both exhibits in a single trip to British Columbia was running out.

My desire to see the originals was so strong that I decided I would travel there alone if I couldn’t find a travelling companion. To my surprise, my always-busy husband Ralph cleared his calendar for a week to accompany me.

Usually when we take a trip together, Ralph—a more experienced traveler than I—makes the arrangements. But this time, I quickly booked flights from Minneapolis, reserved two seats on the ferry between Vancouver and Victoria through BC Connector, pre-purchased tickets to the art exhibits, and took advantage of off-season hotel rates for accommodations at two grand, historic Canadian Pacific railway hotels.

The Fairmont Empress, Victoria, BC

Since the Emily Carr House in Victoria, her childhood home, was closed to the public for the season, a friend suggested that I request a private tour. Jan Ross, the curator of the provincial heritage site, graciously agreed to do so.

We departed Minnesota on November 8th with only three “must-do’s” planned in advance. We left the remainder of the sightseeing and dining adventures to chance, as our spirits and the unpredictable rainy-season weather dictated.

I have always loved being in Canada; once I arrive, I always feel like I have come back home.

The Homecoming, Nathan Scott, sculptor,Victoria, BC

Were Emily Carr’s richly drawn paintings of First Nations villages and totems, dark, haunting forests, wild beaches and vast skies all I imagined they would be?

In next week’s blog post, I’ll share my answer.

Eileen at Vancouver Art Gallery, November 9, 2017

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives my be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

* One Hundred Graces, as selected by Marcia and Jack Kelly (Bell Tower: New York, 1992)

An owl in the trees, Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver, British Columbia

Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia

Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia

Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia