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 Biographer Paula Blanchard writes, “Although she had another show in mind and unpublished manuscripts next to her bed, all her major work was done.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

Six months earlier, on the way home from a party near dawn, I’d totaled a white Volkswagen Beetle. Somersaulting through the convertible’s rag-top roof, twenty-three years of life flashed before my eyes; and I didn’t like what I saw. Too late, I thought. When my body stops rolling, I’ll be dead.

Twenty-two days after the accident, with every inch of my skin blotted with greenish-yellow bruises, I married a man whom I’d met at that party.

Later, when he asked me where I wanted to go on our honeymoon, I answered, “Prince Edward Island—because I want to see the island where Anne of Green Gables took place.”

The book’s protagonist was my childhood heroine. Anne Shirley was spunky and made mistakes. I envied her untamed imagination and indomitable spirit. Growing up in a small, red brick house where talking about feelings was forbidden, Anne was my true kindred spirit.

We honeymooners headed north from Wisconsin in a brown Ford van to Sault Ste. Marie, camped near Sudbury, showered in Quebec, and at Cape Tormentine boarded the car ferry to cross the Northumberland Strait.

L. M. Montgomery’s descriptions did not disappoint. The gables were green, the soil was red, the gulf waters cobalt beneath a periwinkle sky. We boiled lobsters in a pot over a campfire near the windswept dunes, and I believed with Anne Shirley’s fervor that our rash marriage would last forever.

As early as 1897, a journalist with Prince Edward Island Illustrated wrote: “This is the place for weary men and women to come to build up worn-out tissue, to rest the mind, to banish weariness.” So ten years later, divorced, with two young daughters in tow, I returned to the Island, worn out and weary. We flew from Halifax into Charlottetown by prop plane during a thunderstorm. I can still see the fear in my children’s eyes and the pink and lavender packs strapped to their backs.

I returned to PEI almost every summer after that. Seventeen grueling years as a public school administrator had taken its toll on my health and spirit. Ultimately, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction (CFS) and companion depression trapped me in its insidious net.

One cloudless morning in the summer of 1999, I was sitting on a barn red, double-sided, wooden bench on the porch of a run-down cottage that my second husband and I had purchased on Argyle Shore. I could see the coast of Nova Scotia and a peppermint-striped lighthouse guarding its shore. A pair of seals, as black and shiny as a fisherman’s slicker, swam in unison through the gentle surf and shallow waters.

It was the time between tides.

I waited for my nearest neighbor—a red fox—to steal past for his morning drink from a fresh water stream that slices the bank on its way to the sea, and I thought about the musty-smelling sixth-grade autobiography that I’d recently found buried in a box labeled “Eileen’s Things” in my mother’s basement.

My brother had sketched my face on the cover, complete with pointy black plastic glasses. Below my penciled likeness, I’d written, “You are a Portrait in the Picture of Life.” On the back page, my teacher Mrs. Ross had penned in red ink: “This is excellent from beginning to end. I hope you will always keep your zest for living and learning.”

Re-reading my eager, honest, child-like words I remembered how my mother had hovered during the biography’s creation—reminding me to check my grammar, correct my punctuation. “Use your best penmanship,” she admonished. “If you make a mistake, don’t cross it out, start over.”

Calmed by the sea, I could hear her voice. I could feel her pride. By this time Alzheimer’s disease had destroyed her mind, silenced her voice. I wondered, “Do I still have time?”

On Prince Edward Island red clay soil brings forth lavender lupines that line ditches along dusty country roads. Rose-red fireweed creeps between prolific rows of new potatoes. “The lowest ebb,” writes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “is the turn of the tide.”

Within the next year I would enroll in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at St. Paul’s Hamline University. Almost 30 years after my first visit to PEI, I was assigned to write 20 pages of creative prose that thematically reflected Canadian literature. I knew my story would take place on Prince Edward Island.

I asked myself, “What if a Yorkshire terrier from Manhattan washed up on the south shore of PEI, tangled in a lobster trap, and met that red fox? What themes could I capture in that story?”

My first published novel for young readers, Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog, was my response.