by Lewis Desoto
We can only speculate about the need these animals filled. The most obvious conjecture is that they took the place of the children Emily never had. Perhaps Emily might have found in the company of animals the unconditional love that was either difficult or lacking in her contact with humans. These animals were her friends. She could hug, fuss, nurse, and mother them at will.
Anyone who has lived with pets knows that they seem incapable of malice, betrayal, egotism, or cruelty. Dogs, especially, seem to desire only to love us and enjoy our company. They possess an essential simplicity that is close to a state of grace and without the tragedy of human self-consciousness. They live within their limitations, whereas humans constantly chafe against theirs. There is a holiness and an innocence in animals that would have appealed to Emily’s religious nature. Perhaps contact with animals was also a way of being in touch with that same element she perceived in the forests— the non-human aspect of nature.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Face in the Mirror
If a painting is a mirror of the artist, whose is that face looking back at us?
There are no films of Emily Carr. There are black-and-white photographs. There are caricatures drawn by her own hand. There are descriptions by friends and acquaintances. There are a couple of painted self-portraits, and her own writings. So, what did she look like?
In a photograph of the five Carr sisters, taken in 1888 when Emily was seventeen, it is easy to distinguish Emily from the others, for she was physically unlike them. The Carr women are slim, narrow-faced, and their expressions in the photograph are amiable. Emily’s face is more oval, the eyebrows more arched, the eyes more almond-shaped. There is only the slightest resemblance to her mother. In the photograph, Emily is the pretty one. Her expression is guarded and watchful.
She was described as a dreamy and sensitive child, but also as mischievous and independent. A photo of her at sixteen shows a wistful girl with a pet crow on her lap. In England, a friend described her as sturdy, with a mass of dark curly hair. A photo from this period shows a much more serious young woman of thirty-one, without that youthful, pensive, dreamy look.
She always had a sense of humour. In the caricatures from her time in England, she lampoons herself wearing a cape and tam-o’-shanter as she paints in the woods. When she returned from England she had gained weight, no doubt as a result of the forced inactivity and the experimental diets at the sanatorium. Self-caricatures of her in France show a rather stout woman buttoned up in coat and hat, with an umbrella tucked under her arm. It is true that she never dressed to be attractive and had little regard for what others thought of her appearance. Her clothes were simple and mostly black. She didn’t wear makeup and was scrupulously clean. In later life, she almost always wore a black knitted cap or a black headband to restrain her hair.
Her friend Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher described Emily in 1930 as a round, solid little person, with a wrinkle-free face and merry, blue-grey slanted eyes. Her voice was soft and melodious, with something of an English accent. In the photos taken of her as an adult she is often smiling, her eyes twinkling, and one can imagine the radiance of that smile.
Emily had a reputation for being difficult to get along with, yet she always had many friends, and was known by them to be generous and affectionate. She sometimes accused others of selfishness and egotism, but had her fair share of those traits. She had always been an outsider: within her own family and as a colonial in England, a foreigner in France, a Westerner in Toronto, a white among Indians, and an artist among those who had no understanding of her art. She was also separate from the mainstream of society and other women, because she was without a husband and children. Any of this was enough to make her sensitive to slights and criticism. Her journals show that she often felt lonely, neglected, and depressed.
In her diary, on the last day of 1940, at the age of sixty-nine, Emily wrote: “To paint a self-portrait should teach one something about oneself. I shall try.” She also wrote, “I hate painting portraits . . . pulling into visibility what every soul has as much right to keep private.” Carr was intensely private in many ways, preferring to project her feelings into painting and writing. She was also prudish about her body, self-conscious about her weight, and never thought of herself as a suitable subject for a painting. There are very few known self-portraits of Emily.
One of the first, from 1905, when she was about thirty-four, depicts Emily and her dog, done in charcoal and pastel. The two faces, both with curly hair and expressive eyes, are painted with facility and present an accurate likeness. The picture is conventional, although she obviously felt that both she and the dog were out of the ordinary, judging by the title, The Rum’un and the Oddity.
Another self-portrait was painted in 1925, when Emily was fifty-four, and is much more unusual. The artist is seen from the back, her face invisible. One hand holds a palette and brushes, the other is raised to the easel. The red straps of an apron are visible around her neck. It reminds me of a painting by another independent and maligned woman who suffered prejudice because of her choice of career—the early seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting was made in Rome three hundred years before Emily’s painting, yet the pictures are astonishingly similar. Emily might even have seen the earlier painting in London, where it is part of the Royal collection. Although Artemisia’s face is visible in a three-quarter view, she too holds a palette and brushes in her left hand while her right hand is raised to the canvas. She too wears a green dress. Instead of an apron string around her neck, she wears a gold chain to which a little masklike face is attached. Even the face of Artemisia, with its rounded cheeks and black hair, puts us in mind of Emily.
In a standard self-portrait, the artist looks forward in a frontal view, using a mirror to capture the pose. A more complicated arrangement of mirrors would have been necessary for both Emily and Artemisia to see themselves in the unusual perspective they chose, and no doubt the pose is intentional, for the pictures lack the quality either of vanity or self-scrutiny associated with a mirror. Both women want to be acknowledged as artists, not only by painting their own portrait, but also by showing themselves in the act of creating the picture we are looking at.
A late self-portrait by Emily dates from 1938, when she was sixty-seven years old. It was done on paper with thinned paint, and is dashed off with all the bravura of an artist in complete command of her brush. She looks out at the viewer directly now, almost glares, almost a force of nature herself. The portrait is solid and uncompromising. The colours are all earth and forest tones. The brush strokes swirl and swoop. Flecks of white highlight the nose, a corner of the mouth, an errant wisp of hair. The mouth is set, still determined. The eyes are full of intelligence. The picture is grand and stately, and has the same frank self-acknowledgment that we see in Rembrandt’s magnificent late self-portraits. Here I am, the painting says, confronting us: a woman, a human being. It is an extraordinary painting.
There is another way for an artist to make a self-portrait, and that is to imbue some inanimate object with qualities she sees in herself. The term used for this is anthropomorphism: to endow non-human objects with human feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Human qualities can also be attributed to animals, representations of deities, and natural phenomena. The anthropomorphic tendency is often found in religion, mythology, children’s stories, and of course in art and literature.
Emily found such a representation in a totem pole. She called the figure Zunoqua, the wild woman of the woods, and she met this woman three times. The meetings are described in her journals and in the story “D’Sonoqua” in the book Klee Wyck.
The most striking of the paintings that resulted from these meetings, and one of the most unusual in the whole of Carr’s work, is Zunoqua of the Cat Village. Filling the left side of the picture is a stylized figure with exaggerated dark eyes and a grimacing mouth. The head is draped with a serpent. Behind the figure, the vegetation is
a whirl of swirling green waves, from which the faces of yellow-eyed cats stare out. The effect is uncanny. The words that Emily used in her journal to describe her experience are forceful and evocative: “ferocious, creepy, full of unseen things . . . that was some place! There was power behind it.”
In Klee Wyck, Emily describes how she arrived in a remote village with only an Indian girl as a guide. In the drizzle and mist, on a rocky bluff, she stumbles on the path and looks up from a bed of nettles to see a creature looming above her. “She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart.” The eyes bore into Emily and she imagines that the life of the cedar is looking out and the voice of the tree is coming from the mouth of the carved figure. Years later, Emily comes upon a similar figure, and this time her descriptions are similar to those used by others to describe Emily herself. “The whole figure expressed power, weight, domination, rather than ferocity.” When Emily asks who the figure represents, she is told that it is the wild woman of the woods.
On the third occasion when she meets the figure, Emily sees it as a young and fresh singing spirit, graciously feminine and womanly. The wild woman is now shy and untouchable. It was while she was painting this figure that a swarm of feral cats came out of the forest and surrounded Emily, a dozen of them, purring and rubbing her ankles, one even jumping into her lap.
We can speculate that Emily saw herself in the carved poles she painted, as one of those silent, isolated figures, alone, noble, and proud. In light of her written descriptions, we can look at the painting of Zunoqua as not sinister at all, but as an image of integration. The animals, the art, the forest, and the woman are all one together—a self-portrait of the spirit.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Painter
Musing about art in her journal, Emily jotted down this thought:
I do not think that most artists could tell what was their aim in art exactly. It just grew and grew from a small beginning. It necessitates much digging and searching, burrowing as deep as one is able and the using of our hearts as well as our eyes.
One can become a painter by learning the requisite skills and techniques, but to become an artist is a different matter entirely. Emily wanted to make something that was true and real. She could not see what she wanted to make, but her intuition and her desire told her that it existed—if she could find it. She felt blind and alone because what she wanted to make had never yet been seen. She wanted to make something entirely new. The task seemed almost impossible, but she went forth, into the unknown.
All children like to draw, and then, as they grow older, they abandon the pastime. But with a little encouragement, some persist. Emily was one of these. The Carr family had never produced an artist of any sort. Emily was the first. She had some natural talent and some ability, but above all, she had the desire.
When Emily was eight years old she drew a picture of her father’s dog, using a bit of charcoal from the fireplace and a scrap of paper. Years later, after her father’s death, it was found among his papers. On the back he had made the notation, “By Emily. Aged 8.”
She also drew a couple of family portraits from a photograph. When her father gave her some gold coins and commissioned her to make copies of the portraits, she set up a studio in the pantry. She was further encouraged when drawing lessons were arranged.
She wanted to learn more. She sought out teachers, first in San Francisco, then in London, and once again in France. She also learned a great deal from two other artists, Mark Tobey and Lawren Harris. But her greatest lessons came in the forest, from studying totem poles made by carvers whose names she never knew.
No artist emerges from a vacuum or works in one. The idea of the solitary genius is a myth—a myth sometimes encouraged by the artist herself. Emily Carr was not some untutored creator simply expressing herself in paint. She studied her art and was exposed to many influences. The fact that she absorbed and transformed those influences into something unique is a testament to her ability. The kinds of paintings Emily made are a result of deliberate choice and intention. Earlier works of hers show that, if she had been so inclined, she was quite capable of painting conventionally realistic landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. She certainly could have made a career painting that way.
In France, Emily was exposed not only to technical changes, but also to new attitudes that allowed her to think of her subject matter in a new way. Painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin, and later, others like Picasso and Matisse, were interested in what was called the “primitive” in art. They had turned away from the nineteenth-century academic tradition of realistic painting to seek out what they believed was a more authentic subject matter. This took the form not only of painting directly in the landscape, but also of seeking out peasant subjects. This can be seen in some of the paintings made by Gauguin and Van Gogh in Brittany, for example, in which the folk customs and costumes of the French peasantry are much in evidence. Gauguin would later go to Tahiti in search of something untainted by European ways. Picasso and others would look to African masks and sculpture. These forms of non-European art were seen as fresh and original and as a source of renewal for an art that had become stale and decadent. All of this was part of a Romantic search for renewal and a return to something authentic, to a purer form of art in areas that had not been absorbed into Western industrial culture. This tendency certainly validated Emily’s interest in Native art, and gave her the confidence to pursue it when she returned to Victoria.
By her own account, she came back from France with a “new way of seeing,” a better understanding of colour, and a way to use it expressively. When she returned to the forest and looked at the totem poles, the way they stood out against the greens of the trees would have been stunning. She would have noted the bright colours, the black outlines on the forms, the stylized way of representing figures and animals. In Native art, she saw colours that were not tied to an actual description of an animal or figure. Later, when she went deeper into the forest, the works became more sombre, the hues those of leaf and branch, but there is a tremendous variety in the greens, and all sorts of colours are used, subtly and with great refinement.
Through the eyes of someone educated in European art, the totem poles and decorated houses would have seemed unusually colourful and stylized. The innovative way in which animals were transformed and incorporated into the design would have appeared novel and striking. At the same time, this was a living art, not something meant to be displayed in a gallery or museum. The totem poles were integrated into their environment. They were of the place and the people.
Emily wanted to be a Canadian painter. Even when she was in England she talked of wanting to paint the landscape of British Columbia rather than the pretty English country-side. After her first meeting with the Group of Seven painters she wrote in her diary: “Canada and her sons cry out for a hearing but the people are blind and deaf. Their souls are dead. Dominated by dead England and English traditions while living things clamour to be fed.”
She could have stayed in Brittany. Concarneau, where she studied, was a popular artists’ colony, and many painters settled there. There were even Canadian painters who had left for France, never to return, who developed a French style. But Emily was of a different place. The light and the colour of Brittany were not for her. Even though she retained what she had learned about colour, she eventually abandoned the bright Fauve style for the moist greens and the dark shadows of the forest. One of the fathers of Impressionism, the landscape painter Corot, who worked in the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris, had advised younger artists to “seek the muse in the forest.” Emily might have read that advice, for she followed it, literally, although the muse she sought came in a form that would have astonished Corot.
Native art gave her an entry, a stepping stone. Like the Native people, she had been born in this place and grown up in it, albeit in different circumstances and with a different perspective. Nevertheless, she was of the place, and she knew it
in her own way.
On her trips to Toronto, she had seen the freshness in works by the Group of Seven and been impressed by their depiction of the country, but she was of the West Coast. That was her land, and that was what she wanted to paint.
In strictly stylistic terms, the greatest influences upon Emily were Mark Tobey and Lawren Harris. Tobey visited Victoria a number of times and boarded with Emily. He also gave a master class for local artists in Emily’s studio. Tobey was very interested in the formal aspects of a painting; that is, how a painting is composed, where the lights and darks are placed, how a shape can be simplified or abstracted. Harris, too, had simplified his depictions of the landscape. In his pictures, mountains, trees, and water are stripped down to basic forms that are bathed in a soft, raking sidelight. Both Tobey and Harris would eventually develop a purely abstract painting. The general trend in painting during the first six decades of the twentieth century was toward simplification, culminating in pure abstraction. The belief that abstraction could better depict or create in the viewer a spiritual state was just as important as any more formal experimentation.
Carr’s pictures from 1928 onward use many of the devices that Tobey and Harris employed. The totem poles become iconic forms. The trees and foliage in the forest are like sculpted wave forms. The light now seems not so much to fall on objects as to emanate from them.
Emily began to redesign and structure the forms of the forest in her paintings. This is the work of someone who is not copying what she sees, but is thinking about what is in front of her and then synthesizing it into something novel. She paints pictures of the totem poles, but she does not copy them, nor does she adopt the stylistic devices of the Native artist. The style of the paintings is her own. It is the feeling that these objects create in her that is of interest to the artist she has become. Eventually, she goes to the source from which the totems originate: the spirit of the place. The power that she feels emanating from the forest begins to emanate from her own work. While there is always an awareness of the formal devices in a painting, her later paintings are intensely emotional as well.
