Emily Carr

by Lewis Desoto

  Emily did not take an intellectual approach to art, but she was by no means ignorant of modern trends. She had many books with titles such as How to See Modern Art, The New Art, Painters of the Modern Mind, and Western Art and the New Era. Many of the passages in these books were underlined and annotated by her.

  During the 1920s she was often visited in Victoria by artists from Seattle and Vancouver. As well as her trips to Toronto, where she met with Harris and others, she visited New York and Chicago and made the rounds of the galleries there. She met Georgia O’Keeffe, another innovative woman painter who drew her inspiration from nature. Emily was also given a private tour of a collection of avant-garde paintings by Katherine Drier, an author and connoisseur. How much of what she saw directly influenced her is debatable. Carr, like most artists, was concerned with the task at hand. If an idea was useful to her own immediate concerns, she noted it. If not, then it had no effect. Both the ruminations of critics and the judgment of history were irrelevant to her.

  Her career as a painter falls into a rough sequence of styles. First were the landscapes done in the English tradition, and then the documentary studies of Native motifs. With her return from France, a new vigour in the brush strokes and a brightness of colour are evident. After the meetings with Harris and the Group of Seven, there is a simplification of form and a stronger emotional content. The paintings become dramatic and symbolic. Finally, in her late style, she comes out of the forest into the sky: the paintings are full of movement and energy.

  How is a painting made? Well, you find something you want to paint. It might be a tree, or an apple, or your own face. You use a pencil to make a drawing. Very difficult, even if it is just an apple you are trying to draw. Then you take some colour and apply it. But what colour? How much? How to mix that particular tone? How to blend the brush strokes? What to do about the background? Very difficult.

  But how to actually make a painting? Most of Emily’s oil paintings were based on sketches that she made directly in the landscape. She would begin with a pencil drawing. No doubt she had a little tray of watercolours and a pad that she could hold on her lap. Once the drawing was done, she applied the colours. The paint dried as quickly as the water evaporated. First impressions and sensations were what counted at this stage. These sketches might have taken just a few minutes, or much longer if close observation was important, as it was when she wanted to get the exact details of a totem pole. She was always scrupulous about that. In the paintings made before 1927 she always strove for accuracy and exactness, with the idea in mind that she was making a record for history.

  Later, in the studio, she used these little watercolours as the basis for her big oil paintings. During the winter months she would cut pieces of lumber, mitre the corners, and assemble a frame on which a piece of canvas would be stretched. She then applied a ground of white paint to the canvas to seal it and provide a smooth surface. Once this had dried, she could begin working up one of the summer sketches onto the canvas. She would make a simple outline with a brush dipped in thinned paint. Sometimes she changed the composition from the one in the sketch, because reality doesn’t always arrange itself into a pleasing layout. When she was satisfied with the composition, she would begin to block in the basic shapes with colour.

  She preferred to work in privacy—a thoughtless comment from an onlooker could ruin her concentration and sow doubt. Often she would sit and look at a canvas for long hours without lifting the brush. She wanted the painting to speak to her, to reveal what it was becoming. She did the same thing when she was in the landscape itself, sitting and looking, listening to her inner voice and the voice of the forest. Sometimes she failed to hear what she was listening for, and gave up. But she always came back; she always persevered.

  A close-up view of one of her paintings reveals that the way she used paint was not in the least bit naïve or accidental. In some parts the paint is thin; in others, thicker patches are placed to catch the light or emphasize a texture. Colours are very subtly placed next to each other, as when a violet or orange appears in the midst of a swath of green. In some sections the colour is intense and pure, then it becomes restrained and suggestive. The abstraction of the forms, the selection of viewpoint and focus—all are refined and deliberate. Like a violinist drawing all the nuances out of the strings, from the most forceful march to the most delicate pizzicato, she used her brush as a delicate instrument, not only as a tool but also as an extension of her very self.

  Often, as they get older, artists develop a more fluid, almost impatient style, with a very loose brush stroke. One sees it in the last works of Rembrandt, Titian, and Picasso. They are aware of their failing health and fading eyesight. At this stage, an artist has achieved perfect technical mastery. The movement of the painter’s hand becomes quick. Attention is directed toward achieving the big effect, going straight to the heart of the matter. Detail is either subordinated or ignored.

  There is no time for equivocation. At the very end of her career, Emily switched to using paper instead of canvas as the support, and cheaper paints thinned to a liquid consistency with turpentine, and on occasion, gasoline. Contrary to the myths about Carr, she did not do this out of poverty, but in order to be able to work out of doors on a large scale in oil paint. An oil painting usually takes days, or even weeks, to dry, but thinned and applied to paper, the paint would have some of the same properties as watercolour in its liquidity and drying time.

  If there is one artist she can be compared to at this stage, it is Van Gogh. In both his last paintings and hers, subject and method are united. All the shapes and forms become flowing brush strokes that display a tremendous intensity. Carr sometimes seemed rough-hewn and crude, but her technical ability was the equal of any painter’s, and she surpasses most of her peers in her sophisticated understanding and employment of the visual language of painting.

  The mature works upon which Emily’s reputation rests were the result of long years of development. The paintings we now look at, and can recognize as Emily Carr’s, came about after much struggle, through the meeting between what she learned in France and what she saw in the totem poles. The mature painter neither copies nor represents her subject. It doesn’t matter if she is an innovator or an original; what matters is that she makes something true. But there is never a finished style in an artist’s work. There is always evolution. There is always the next painting to be done.

  Whatever her influences were, she transcended them. As a painter, her goal finally was not to make a picture of a subject, but to make a work of art that stood alone. The subject of the painting is the painting itself. It is from that rectangle of coloured pigment that all meaning and beauty must flow. Carr brings the painting out from the forest, and what we see, what we perceive, is not a picture, but a sensation. The painting is pure sensation, which we in turn experience. Emily Carr, the painter, immersed herself totally in her own experience and created something that is partly the forest, partly herself, but mostly something else entirely.

  In her best paintings, Emily Carr is no longer describing the forest or landscape, but painting an equivalent of the experience of being in the place. The paintings are masterpieces of construction: they are imaginative, they are interpretations, they are facts. And that is what makes them so marvellous and admirable. Sometimes, when I look at her paintings, I can only shake my head in wonder and admiration.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Loves of Emily

  The relationship with the first man in a woman’s life, her father, can lay the pattern for what follows in her relations with all men. Richard Carr was fifty-three when Emily was born. As the youngest girl, Emily was her father’s favourite. In the morning, when her father walked to his business, Emily accompanied him as far as the bridge. She was there again to greet him when he returned in the afternoon. They shared a love of flowers and birds. He once remarked that she should have been the boy in the family.

  Something happened between them when she wa
s in her teens and, after that, she was no longer his favourite, and he was no longer hers. She referred to it as the “brutal telling,” and only in her last years was she able to write about what had happened. Evidently, Richard Carr, rather than his wife or the older girls, explained the facts of sex and reproduction to Emily. She described it as horrible sex things told disgustingly. The effect was traumatic and devastating, and she remembered it vividly in an unpublished journal written when she was in her sixties:

  Telling me things a happy innocent child should not hear and telling them in a low and blatant manner. I couldn’t forgive Father, I just couldn’t, for spoiling all the loveliness of life with that bestial brutalness of an explanation, filling me with horror instead of gently explaining the glorious beauty of reproduction, the holiness of it.

  Richard Carr died a few years later, when Emily was seventeen. His death left the matter forever unresolved. In later years, when she read Richard Carr’s own diaries, she saw him as strong, brave, honest, and kindly. But at his funeral she stood over his grave looking down into the hole, and felt relief. Her mother had died two years earlier and she was now without parental authority and structure. The early death of parents always leaves a scar, and in some cases, the wound underneath is never healed.

  When Emily was twenty-eight years old she fell in love with one man, and a different man fell in love with her. She would break the heart of one, and the other would break hers. She was not ignorant of what goes on between men and women. She had lived on her own at art school in San Francisco. She was aware of the facts of sex, not only from her father, but also from seeing animals mate. Her sister Clara had married and had children of her own. Nevertheless, Emily was a naïve and inexperienced young woman, and for her, a kiss was more than just a kiss.

  The identity of her first love is unknown. He took her into his arms and kissed her at a garden party. We have to assume that is all that happened. But the effect was over-whelming. First love is not only emotional, it is powerfully physical. Yet the love Emily felt for this man was not returned, and she said that it took her fifteen years to kill the feeling. Her own words speak eloquently of her pain. They were written in 1935, when she was sixty-four, and although they seem to refer to this incident, the passionate intensity with which she writes can lead one to speculate that there might have been another great love in her life:

  And the love of the lover sweeping you clean off your feet, making you forget the horrible sex things told so disgustingly when you were a little child, things that frightened you horribly. And yet in the passionate love of the lover, forgetting every bit of the horror, willing to give every bit of your body and life and love in floodtide ocean fairly drowning the beloved, and to find it was not wanted and never, never, to quite know why, only to know it must be so, and to eat one’s heart out alone always, never daring to tell a soul, shamed and broken and hurt at your own indecency, of loving so furiously, so overwhelmingly—unasked and unwanted—to find the caresses and kisses were only sport, selfish amusement, your heart used as a shuttlecock, batted furiously hither and thither only lasting one game, thrown aside, feathers broken, balance broken, a hideous, battered, smashed-up toy that could never be mended or straightened again. Only good for one game, then finding its way to the garbage can, grimed and fouled. Oh love, poor love. Not mended or soothed and strengthened but murdered and thrown out and towed far far out to sea and dumped. Oh!

  That passage stands out in all of literature as one of the great cries of anguish from a wounded woman’s heart.

  And then there was the other man, Mayo Paddon. Emily met him on the steamer trip to Ucluelet, up the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1898, when she was twenty-six. Paddon was the purser on the ship. In one of those curious synchronicities that life throws up, this was also Emily’s first significant encounter with First Nations art and life. Paddon and Emily became friendly. He called on her often in Victoria. The young couple could even be said to be courting. Paddon proposed. Emily demurred. For some time, Emily had been planning to continue her art studies in England. That year she left for London. While she was there, Paddon appeared. He proposed daily. She refused daily. She did not love him. Besides, she had just embarked on the beginning of a long-held ambition—to become a real artist. She knew all the benefits that marriage would bestow on her: stability, a place in society, a home, and children. But she had also seen her own mother subservient to Richard Carr. Emily said that her mother was always Mrs. Father, never Mrs. Mother. As for children, Mrs. Carr had been worn down by nine pregnancies, and died at the age of fifty.

  The difference between being a mother and an artist had been demonstrated dramatically to Emily some years before. In San Francisco she had boarded in the house of a woman artist, who was also a widow with small children. The woman struggled in poverty and could not afford proper medical care when one of her children became ill. Emily wrote of the incident, “Art I hate you, I hate you! You steal from babies!” Art demands a price from the artist, and in that incident, Emily had a glimpse of the reckoning. She knew that marriage would stifle her art.

  Paddon stayed for three months in London before he finally accepted her refusal as irrevocable. He burned all the letters they had exchanged, and later married someone else, but for years afterwards, Emily received a pressed flower from him every Christmas.

  Love for Emily would never again be erotic. Two other men were significant in her affections: the artist Lawren Harris and the broadcaster Ira Dilworth. While both men were younger than Emily, they functioned as older brothers, Harris as an artistic and spiritual mentor and Dilworth as her literary adviser and editor.

  Emily used the word “love” frequently in her reminiscences and correspondence. In two other cases, referring to a woman and a girl, she meant the word more than casually.

  Around 1922 she became friends with a twelve-year-old pupil boarding at Alice’s school. Her name was Carol Williams. They shared a love of animals and had a similar sense of humour. Carol wanted to be an artist, and Emily gave her painting lessons. They began to see one another daily. Carol helped her dig clay from the cliffs for the pottery-making enterprise Emily had started. She probably boarded with Emily while at school—her parents lived forty miles away—and even went on a brief sketching trip with Emily. Emily called her “Baboo,” because she said she had always wanted both a baboon and a daughter. Carol called Emily “Mom.” So close did they become that Emily asked Mrs. Williams if she could adopt Carol. Mrs. Williams declined the offer.

  In the companionship of this little girl, Emily found not only an outlet for the maternal love she contained, but also a way of being a child again. It was one of the happiest periods of her life. In 1926 Carol moved to Ontario, and later married. They remained close for the rest of Emily’s life. In the last photograph of Emily, taken in the summer of 1944, shortly before her death, she is sitting in a wheelchair on the cliffs in Beacon Hill Park. The woman standing next to the frail but smiling Emily, one hand resting on Emily’s shoulder, is Carol.

  Emily tended to befriend the underdog, the waif, the excluded. And if she did not actively campaign to change her friends’ situation, she certainly empathized with them. She might have been guilty of condescension, and she seems never to have questioned the automatic entitlement she enjoyed, but in these ways she was very much a product of her times. This is not to diminish her warm heart.

  Over the years, it has often been said that Emily sublimated all her erotic impulses into her paintings. Commentators have found phallic imagery in the tree trunks, and womblike associations in the cavities and hollows of the forests. It is worth remembering that the theories of Sigmund Freud, which are usually evoked in these interpretations, are speculations, more literary than scientific, and might say more about the viewer than about Emily Carr. She herself was offended when she heard about such interpretations. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, who was subjected to the same speculations and vehemently resisted them, she knew that if she acknowledged
that line of interpretation she would become notorious and diminished as an artist. Her paintings celebrated the fecundity of natural life, but they were always about many other things as well.

  She assumed a maternal role in many of her relationships. She acknowledged that, unless someone has been a parent, that person could not know the true fullness of life. When it came to marriage and parenting, she felt herself to be incapable of “the life-long building up and tying down to another’s will, not being free.” That was the reckoning she paid for being an artist. Some of her maternal feelings were bestowed upon her art, as she wrote in her diary:

  I feel about my paintings exactly as if they were my children. They are my children, of my body, my mind, my innermost being. When people call them horrible and hideous I resent it deeply. I can’t help it. I know people don’t have to like my pictures, but when they condemn them I feel like a mother protecting her young.

  Emily has also been characterized as a social misfit, a kind of hermit, possessing too prickly a personality to form relationships with other people. Far from it. She probably had a wider and more inclusive social life than most other people, men and women, of her time.

  Perhaps because she was a single woman, dependent upon the social support of other women, Emily maintained friendships with a great many people throughout her life. Whenever she travelled, whether it was in Europe or eastern Canada, or to remote villages in British Columbia, there was always someone, some family connection or acquaintance, upon whom she could call for hospitality. She must have been likeable to have made so many friends.