Emily Carr (2 page)

The silence was absolute, almost a palpable physical presence. The tall, rust-coloured tree trunks of fir and cedar soared upward like the pillars of an ancient temple, and the shafts of sunlight falling down through the canopy glowed like molten gold. The swooping boughs of foliage seemed to hang in frozen waves of green—such a variety of greens.

A raven croaked overhead, with that deep hollow sound they sometimes make, and in the following silence I heard its wings like a whisper in the trees.

I sensed the vastness of this country, the emptiness of it, all the ancient days of it. I felt as if I were standing in a place where no human had stood, and none might ever stand again. I was nothing, an insignificant passing sigh on the breeze. A moment of unaccountable terror shivered over me.

An image of an Emily Carr painting came to my mind, of a forest like this one, with the same primeval grandeur. But in that painting, the dread and solitude had been subsumed into a reverent harmony, as if the silence and the awe, the leaves and the raven, and the lone human being were part of a grand creation that could be approached only with wonder and celebration. I realized how much the scene in front of me
looked like an Emily Carr painting. It was almost as if I were seeing it through her eyes. Those paintings that I used to frown at and dismiss had somehow imprinted themselves on my consciousness, in such a powerful manner that what I saw before me now was less a forest of trees and leaves and more a work of art, half nature, half Emily Carr.

Later, I went back to the art gallery and looked again at the paintings. I began to be interested in this woman, whom I really knew nothing about. Who was she? Where did she come from? How had she lived? And, above all, how had she arrived at her extraordinary paintings?

I would encounter a truly remarkable and talented woman who lived with bravado and curiosity. Not only was she physically brave and strong, but she also possessed deep psychological courage. She was not some little old lady in the woods, but a complex and contradictory individual who lived a noteworthy and varied existence of great originality, and in so doing made a part of the world visible in all its beauty and mystery.

The tourist who visits the museums, the hiker in the rainforest, the visitor who buys a postcard of a Carr painting because it seems to contain some essence of this part of the country, the new immigrant turning the pages of a history of Canada, even the descendants of the original inhabitants of
the West Coast—all see this place with just a little bit of Emily Carr in their vision.

Emily Carr, the person, defies easy description. Painter, writer, world traveller, adventurer—she was also an original, a rebel, a free spirit, and a visionary mystic. She is one of those unique individuals, those few, who have created and articulated the symbols and images by which Canada knows itself, and through which we know ourselves.

Writing about the past is like standing on a cliff edge looking into the mist while trying to recognize a person you have never met. There is no truth about the past—there are versions only. But that does not preclude our attempts to know it. Curiosity is justification enough. In a time that is remote from us now, Emily Carr stands as an icon, a colossus almost, and if only for that reason she draws our attention.

The elements in society that make reputations, that drive the buying and selling of art, that publicize and celebrate and define art, are not found in provincial cities but in the great urban centres of the world. Emily chose to remain in her small corner. If she had lived in Paris, London, or Berlin, or if the technology of communication and travel that exists now had been available in her time, then every book on the history of art would include an Emily Carr. Her works would hang in the Tate Modern in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That is where they belong,
alongside Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch and Paul Cézanne.

Nevertheless, Emily's name is in our history books. A busy industry revolves around Emily Carr: academics write and argue about her; museums mount exhibitions of her work; the tourist business markets her life and images; her childhood house is a museum. Her story, with its drama and eccentricity, satisfies our need for larger-than-life figures with whom to populate our mythology. Her paintings are reproduced on postage stamps, calendars, and postcards. Novels have been written about her, films made, even a stage play. Along with the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, she is, for many, the best-known Canadian artist. But more than that, her work is among the images of Canada itself.

We see the West Coast landscape through the prism of Emily Carr's paintings, just as much as the central Ontario landscape is filtered through the paintings of the Group of Seven. There are no paintings that describe the coastal rain-forest before Emily. That is the mark of her originality—not her technique or colours or style. She gave a form and a meaning to a landscape. Her paintings are images through which Canada becomes visible, to us and to others.

In the end, the paintings are what remain—the most significant verifiable fact in the history of Emily Carr. We
need to know nothing of the artist, her times, or the context in which the paintings were made to respond to them as art. But an image is never either neutral or mute. We can say with certainty of the paintings only that they are made of canvas and pigment. What they say to us depends as much on what we know as on what we don't know. And so we must try to know the woman, if only to consider what other things the paintings speak of. As she put it in her journal, “Something of you can get trapped forever in the picture as long as it lasts.” Each one of her paintings is the evidence of a woman's hand. Each brush stroke is the trace of a gesture and a thought.

For all the words written by and about Emily Carr, she remains something of an enigma. We continue to be fascinated by her, this woman who travelled to the wild, dark places and returned to tell us the tale of where she had been.

WE CAN NEVER REALLY KNOW
anyone from the past. There are some facts, some speculations, many opinions, and a great many disagreements. There are Emily Carr's writings, her correspondence, some photos. And, of course, there are the paintings. In the end, there is only an interpretation, and the hope of a small measure of truth.

The past does leave a legacy that accumulates, and through which we can understand ourselves. Emily Carr is situated in
our history now, and the legacy she left, in her paintings and writings and in the trajectory of her life, is a part of that always-forming idea we call Canada.

A common error we make when thinking about distant times is to imagine them as somehow old-fashioned, and the people who inhabited another era to be equally out of date. We look backward into time and see its inhabitants as being ignorant, quaint, and mistaken in so much. But every person is always born into a modern world, every moment is the lived present, on the threshold of the future.

The ancient Romans did not think of themselves as ancient; the Haida fisherman on the Queen Charlotte Islands knew his world to be new each time the sun rose; the child walking to school in 1881 did not think it was quaint to live in the Victorian age. All of them lived in the present, in what was for them the most modern era yet, in the most advanced of times.

When we look at photographs of Emily Carr and the world she lived in, we are apt to smile condescendingly at the rather comical fashions: the silly hats and uncomfortable dresses, the tightly buttoned gentlemen in their top hats, the horse-drawn buggies and paddle steamers. But it was all modern in its day.

The same can be said of the art of the past. The bright colours of Monet and Van Gogh and the daring geometry of
early abstraction are part of the history of art now. We are accustomed to them. But in their time they all had the shocking strangeness of the new. So, too, with the paintings of Emily Carr. No matter how much a part of our world they are now, each one as it appeared on her canvas was something the world had not seen before.

Today we embrace originality in art and in life. If Emily had been born into our time, with her talent, her independence, and her ambition, she almost certainly would have been famous at a young age rather than remaining an unknown artist for most of her life. The Emily Carrs of today have cell phones and computers. Some of them become celebrities who represent Canada in international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, give interviews to glossy magazines, command high prices for their work, set trends, and define styles. That they are able to do so, women as well as men, in a way that Emily Carr never dreamed of is due in no small part to the example of her courage and determination to be an artist.

So, let us take a walk with Emily, back and forth through time, starting outside the Carr house in the neighbourhood of James Bay, a quiet residential area on the southern side of Victoria's Inner Harbour, a short stroll from the city centre.

The house is now a museum, on a small plot on Government Street, which used to be known as Carr Street, and before that, when the house was first built on its eight acres of land, was just a grassy country lane. Woods stood here, flower and vegetable gardens, an orchard, a barn for cows and pigs. To the left as we go down the street is Beacon Hill Park, now mostly landscaped but still wild and uncultivated in parts, as it was when the young Emily wandered here.

After a couple of blocks, we reach the Pacific Ocean. A marker on the shoreline denotes Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway. Some say that Canada begins here, others that it ends at this spot.

Most maps of Canada terminate at this point, but just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca are the Olympic Mountains
of Washington State and a coastline that extends to San Francisco and beyond. Travel west across the Pacific Ocean and the first landfall will be Japan. To the east, across another body of water (the Strait of Georgia), reminding us that Victoria is on an island, lies Vancouver and the vast mainland of Canada. A journey north up the coast will take you to the Queen Charlotte Islands—or to give them their original name, Haida Gwaii—and onward to Alaska.

On her walk in the 1880s, Emily might have seen some Native canoes pulled up at a campsite on the shore, beached there by people coming from up the coast to either trade or visit. Today we see a line of buses waiting at the dock for the giant cruise ships that bring tourists to Victoria in their thousands each summer. A Coast Guard station sits at the entrance to the harbour now. The float planes that make the trip to Vancouver in a half-hour buzz overhead and then skim into James Bay. A trip across to Vancouver would have taken Emily a full day.

At Laurel Point, where the shoreline turns into the harbour proper, a meandering walkway lined with flowerbeds passes in front of the deluxe hotels. We can look across the bay to Songhees Point, where tall, luxurious condominiums have spread along the shore. The Songhees First Nation used to live there, part of the Salishan people, and in
Emily's youth the Songhees reserve had some two thousand inhabitants.

Our walk brings us to the provincial parliament buildings, which were completed in 1896, just a year after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. At the terminus of the harbour stands the Empress Hotel, another reminder that this was, after all, an outpost of the British Empire.

In the days of Emily's youth, Victoria was still something of a frontier town. The sidewalks were wooden and transportation was by horse and coach. But the city was growing rapidly. There were many new buildings of stone and brick, including warehouses, churches, and hotels. Today it has a university, an art gallery, a symphony orchestra, and is Canada's fifteenth-largest city.

Near the legislature stands the Royal B.C. Museum and Thunderbird Park, which contains a Native long-house and a number of totem poles. This is probably Victoria's most popular stop for tourists. If Emily could see the park today, she might view it with some irony. She once offered a collection of her paintings to the museum, but the proposal was rejected. In the years after Emily's death her paintings would be exhibited here many times, but at the time of her passing only one of her works was in the provincial collection.

Emily's path would have brought her now to a bridge leading into the city proper, where the little girl used to walk hand in hand with her father each morning, and meet him again at the end of the day when he returned from his place of business.

The Carr family was a respectable, Victorian colonial household of comfortable means. The parents were English born, and had lived for some years in California before settling in Victoria. Emily was the youngest of five girls. Her brother, Dick, the last child, was four years younger. When Emily was born her father was fifty-three and her mother thirty-five. There was a difference of fifteen years between Emily and her eldest sister, Edith. Emily was called Milly, to distinguish her from her mother, who had the same name. Sometimes she was also called Small, a name she would resurrect when she wrote about her childhood in
The Book of Small
many years later.

Richard Carr left his home in England as a young man and travelled in Europe and then on the American continent, from Peru to northern Canada, working at a variety of occupations. He saw much of the rough side of life, but always retained his British manner and ideals. He made his money as a merchant in California and then in Victoria, with a warehouse on Wharf Street within walking distance of the house he built in James Bay.

Little is known about Emily's mother. She met Richard Carr in California and returned to England to marry him there, where they lived for five years. But as his daughter was to do later, Richard Carr chafed at the confines of English society, disliked the dreary weather, and longed for the openness of North America. The Carrs settled in Victoria. Like their fellow citizens, finding themselves positioned between the unruly United States and the wild North, they clung to their British heritage. They became in many respects more English than the English themselves.