Emily Carr (1871-1945) is an artist whose paintings are a perfect fit for the celebration of Arbor Day on Friday, April 29. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, she was the second youngest of nine children in a strict Presbyterian household. Emily was the family rebel. She was determined to draw, and at an early age was allowed to take drawing lessons. She went on to study off and on from 1889 until 1895 at the San Francisco Art Institute, the West Minister School of Art in London in 1889, and the Academy Colarossi in Paris in 1910. Between trips to Europe, she returned to Victoria where she organized and taught art classes to ladies’ groups. Carr smoked and cussed and could be rather rude, but she was very good with children.
She began visiting Skagway and the Haida indigenous people in British Columbia. She became fascinated with the native culture of Canada. She lived with them and got to know them and their culture. The people and their totem poles became her subject matter for the next several years. Carr’s painting style is her own, but it uses the bright and penetrating colors of French artists. Her enthusiasm for her subject is represented by the careful depiction of the totem poles placed in the richly colored and wild landscape. The Indians gave her the name Klee Wyck (the laughing one), also the title of one of her books first published in 1941. It is a wonderful telling of her memoirs from her journal, and it won the Governor General’s Award for books that year.
Carr visited British Columbia, to the Haida and Upper Skeena River from 1912 until 1927: “Whenever I could afford it, I went up North, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not…. I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.”
Carr exhibited 200 of these paintings at the Dominion Hall in Vancouver in 1913. She commented, “the Indians do not make them now and they will soon be a thing of the past. I consider them real Art treasures of a passing race.” Unfortunately, when she offered the paintings to a new Provincial museum, they were refused because they were modern representation and were considered inaccurate.
Carr had to stop painting from 1913 until approximately 1924. She returned to Victoria, and to make a living, she ran a boarding house she named The House of All Sorts. She also raised chickens and rabbits, bred Old English Sheepdogs, and made pottery. In 1924, when Carr was in Seattle to see the exhibition Artists of the Pacific Northwest, she met Mark Tobey, an American artist from Seattle. Inspired by Tobey, Carr started painting again. She was invited in 1927 by Canada’s Group of Seven artists to participate in their exhibition. The group stated, “You are one of us.” She was welcomed and supported for the first time.
In 1930/31 Carr began a series of paintings of trees. She wrote in her journal in January 1931 about being tired of the past direction of her work: “My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.” Carr plunged again into the British Columbian forest and found trees, but she also found logging and the destruction of the forest. “Western Forest” (1931) depicts a dense rich green forest, so dense that only a few yellow streaks of sunlight and touches of white cloud and blue sky penetrate the silent depth of the forest. The trees are majestic.
Carr was a prolific painter and writer. A journal entry describes her feelings: “Here is a picture, a complete thought–and there another–and there. There is everywhere something sublime, something ridiculous or joyous or calm or mysterious. Tender youngness laughing at gnarled oldness, moss and ferns and leaves and twigs, light and air, depth and colour–chatting, dancing a mad joy dance, only apparently tied up in stillness and silence.”
Carr’s passion can best be expressed by her own words, written in journals and then published in several books: “What do these forests make you feel? Their weight and density, their crowded orderliness. There is scarcely room for another tree and yet there is space around each. They are profoundly solemn yet upliftingly joyous. You can find everything in them that you look for, showing how absolutely full of truth, how full of reality the juice and essence of life are in them. They teem with life, growth, expansion….”
She observed, “Trees are much more sensible than people, steadier and more enduring…I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people.” Carr’s work finally was reaching viewers across Canada and beyond. Her first solo exhibition was in Toronto at the Women’s Art Association in 1935. Her work was included in a group exhibition in 1938 at the Tate Gallery in London. She stepped upon the national and international stage. Her work was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair of 1939.
Carr did not miss the destruction of her beloved forest by the logging industry. As her tree series continued so did logging, and her paintings and journals included her thoughts on this sad trend. Titled “Odd and Ends” (1939) (26.5’’ x 42’’) a journal entry describes her thoughts: “Growth had repaired all the damage and hidden the scars. There were second-growth trees, lusty and fine, tall-standing, bracken and sword ferns, sallal, rose and blackberry vines, useless trees that nobody cuts, trees ill-shaped and twisty that stood at the foot of those mighty arrow-straight monarchs long since chewed by steel teeth in the mighty mills, chewed into utility, nailed into houses, churches, telephone poles, all the ‘woodsyness’ extracted, nothing remaining but wood.”
Carr suffered a heart attack in 1937, and another in 1939. A stoke in 1940, and a third heart attack in 1942, left her with limited movement. She lived with her sister and wrote seven books about her life. She was to be awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of British Columbia, but she died just before the ceremony. In 1952, Emily Carr work was chosen to represent Canada in its first entry into the Venice Biennale. Emily Carr, whose art was scorned by the art market until she was 50 years old, never stopped painting, never stopped writing, and never stopped loving the natives and trees of British Columbia.
Note: “Crazy Stair” (1913) sold in 2013 for $3.39 million. “Skedans (Haida Gwaii)” (1912) sold at auction in 2019 for an undisclosed amount between $3 and $5 million. “Cordova Drift” (1931) sold in 2021 for $3.36 million.
Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years. Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning. She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.
Gill says
I saw an exhibit of Emily Carr’s work in Toronto many years ago. It was exhilarating and mystical.