by Lewis Desoto
The forest can be mysterious, sinister, inhospitable, and unknown. It occupies a powerful place in our consciousness, hovering there with a primal intensity. In Emily’s day there was no poetry, no painting, no music, and no literature through which to approach this unknown. The anonymous carvers of the totem poles led Emily toward the shadows, and in them, she found a way to the light. “The power that I felt was not in the thing itself,” she noted in her journal, “but in some tremendous force behind it.”
In the 1930s Emily began to attend church again, as well as all sorts of lectures dealing with spirituality. She even invited one speaker home and showed him her paintings. Her thoughts were directed very much to expressing her religious feelings in her painting. In her journals from this period, the word “God” is repeated a great many times, and always linked with nature. When she talks of God she uses the language of Christianity, but it was a god that was a result of a personal approach. As she stated in her private notebook, “God in all. Always looking for the face of God, always listening for the voice of God in Nature. Nature is God revealing himself, expressing his wonders and his love. Nature clothed in God’s beauty of holiness.” Emily herself said that churchgoers might have thought of her as outside the Church, and she preferred to visit empty churches, but she was religious and always had been. The forest became her church. In some paintings, the trunks of the trees are reminiscent of the pillars inside a cathedral, and the shafts of light are like those that fall through the windows of a church.
Painting from nature became a form of meditation and prayer, a way of communing with and being part of the divine spirit that is the universe. The act of painting had itself become an act of worship. In her journal, Emily described her method of approaching nature:
Sit quietly and silently acknowledge your divinity and oneness with the creator of all things. Enter the silence and feel yourself pivoting on the one source and Substance God. When you are permeated with this feeling of oneness with the creator regard that which is before you till some particular phase of it arrests your attention and then form your Ideal, thinking deeply into it, seeing God in all, drawing the holiness of his Idea to you and absorbing it till you become one with it, and at home with your subject. Rely on your intuition, which is the voice of God to lead you and tell you step by step how to proceed. The working will come through the Spirit.
In nature she saw the underlying life force that is in everything. Her paintings communicate that same intensity, mystery, and awe she had experienced when looking at the totem poles or sitting in the woods. She painted not as an observer, but from the inside—inside the forest and inside herself. Whatever mystical notions she projected onto the landscape, they were not mere romanticism, for she was aware of the biological forces at work in nature, and saw them as evidence of the pulsing life that is in everything. “Though everything was so still, you were aware of tremendous forces of growth pounding through the clearing, aware of sap gushing in every leave, of push, push, push, the bursting of buds; the creeping of vines. Everything expanding every minute.”
She infuses her work with the intensity of her religious feelings. There are no habitations, no animals, no humans in the paintings now, just nature, pure, essential, almost abstract. It was life, but outside the human context.
All her life she had sought the god spirit—to find it, to show it, and to be in it. Some painters work for praise and riches. And some work for something that most of us are unaware of until the artist brings it to our attention. Like the great religious painters of the past, she painted neither for fame nor glory, but for God.
Her spiritual yearnings found a form of expression in her paintings. Art and religion coincided. Art was the act and the symbol of the spiritual meaning she had found. The painting was not only the means but also the expression, a visual manifestation. Her final paintings have an ecstatic rapture to them that is almost unrivalled in art.
Emily’s mystical quest develops in a complex, circuitous path. She begins with youthful churchgoing, and then the Native encounter, followed by Harris and theosophy, a return to the Church, a journey deeper into the forest where she paints in a new way, and then the final synthesis of it all into ecstatic rapture.
Two of Emily’s most frequently reproduced paintings can serve as an illustration of her mystical development. They are Indian Church (1929) and Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1935). In the first, a simplified white church is dwarfed by the looming sculptural forms of the surrounding forest. There is something a little sentimental and obvious in it, and yet it speaks to so many people as an image, not only of a habitation in the vastness of nature, but also of the human in the universal.
In the second painting, completed just six years later, a tall, thin tree trunk shoots up from a strip of land at the bottom of the picture into a sky of radiating light. The emotional and symbolic content affects us in an almost physical manner. The power of the painting is undeniable. It is beyond design and decoration; no longer a depiction of something that is meant to represent rapture, it is rapture, the very embodiment and expression of ecstatic liberation.
A note to herself in her diary serves as eloquent advice on how we might also approach her paintings:
A picture is not a collection of portrayed objects nor is it a certain effect of light and shade nor is it a souvenir of a place nor a sentimental reminder, nor is it a show of colour nor a magnificence of form, nor yet is it anything seeable or sayable. It is a glimpse of God interpreted by the soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Failure and Success of Emily Carr
Is it better to have a happy life than to achieve great things? Would Emily Carr have been happier if she had chosen another path? There was never any doubt in most people’s minds that Emily Carr was a genuine and original artist. Whether her work was accepted or not, it was recognized as the real thing. It was her tragedy and her gift to be compelled to make art.
Success and failure are both relative. A poet once stated that there was no success like failure, and failure was no success at all. Emily would have understood the paradox in that statement, and the irony. She was a woman of many contradictions. Her life can be seen as a series of apparent failures, yet each failure also contained within it the elements of success. She was a success because she was a failure.
When, after five years of study in England, she returned to Canada without having established herself as an artist and without having developed a personal style, she thought of herself as a failure. Yet her experience as a colonial in the motherland, alienated by a culture in which she could find no part, deepened her identification with the West Coast and gave her a stronger sense of belonging.
After Emily returned from France, her exhibition of paintings in the new style met with little success. Rather than give up and resume an acceptable way of painting, she determined to develop and adapt that new style to the landscape she knew.
If we measure a woman’s success in life—as her society did—by her prosperous husband, her enviable house, her talented and beautiful children, and her elevated status in the hierarchy of society, then Emily Carr was a failure. But the choices she made also gave her the freedom to live and think independently.
The attempt to make a historical record of totem poles failed when the provincial government rejected her project and declined to fund it. Yet now we look to her paintings of totem poles as one of the few records that do exist. Furthermore, she eventually rejected the role of ethnographer and discovered something much more important in Native art—a religious identification with nature.
The lack of sales and acclaim for most of her career made her realize that fame and fortune are not the point of making art. And her isolation from the mainstream of art forced her to rely on her own inner convictions and to develop an originality that was earned and that places her above her peers in both achievement and artistic integrity.
At the end, her body failed her, with illness and old age. But by the
n she had achieved a serenity and a mystical sense of transcendence beyond the physical. And, finally, through the legacy of the paintings she left to the world, she achieved immortality.
The greatest success in life is how we engage with the world, how we live. It can be said of Emily Carr that she embraced life with desire, courage, determination, and passion. And that is the best kind of success.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Epitaph
There is a story often told that goes something like this:
The heroine leaves home for unknown regions in search of a special goal or object. After many setbacks and difficult encounters, and with the aid of benevolent helpers at crucial moments along the way, she reaches her destination and finds what she is seeking. But, in doing so, she discovers the true meaning of the quest, which was not a place or an object, but an inner goal.
Most of the world’s cultures have in their mythology some version of this quest narrative, whether it is in Homer’s Odyssey from ancient Greece, medieval knights in their search for the Holy Grail, or a story as contemporary as The Wizard of Oz or The Lord of the Rings. The quest stories are essentially tales of personal transformation and can be interpreted as a metaphor for an individual’s journey through life. The ultimate goal is not success or achievement, but the getting of wisdom.
The journey is always a long and arduous one, sometimes lasting a lifetime. Travel to distant and unknown places is always involved. Opponents and situations arise to block the path and challenge the heroine. There are dangers and setbacks. Sometimes the quest is abandoned temporarily when the heroine gives up and retreats. Sacrifice is always involved and courage is essential.
Emily Carr’s life reads as one of these quest stories. The naïve young girl leaves home with only one ambition, to be an artist, but she does not yet understand the true meaning of art. She completes one task, to study in San Francisco, but finds it is not enough, and sets off again, this time for England. There she encounters prejudice, loneliness, and isolation. She must also sacrifice the hope of love. A setback comes in the form of illness that temporarily ends her quest. Once recovered, she journeys to France, and finds success when she develops a new painting style and has two of her pictures shown at the Salon. But the success brings no immediate benefit. The goal has not yet been achieved.
Then the journey takes her into the deep forest, where she encounters a world that is different and mysterious. She begins to develop as an artist, yet the world turns away from what she offers. She gives up the fight, having sacrificed personal happiness and her youth for an unattainable goal. The years of retreat follow.
The benevolent helper appears in the form of Lawren Harris. Like the wizards of old, he gives her the key, by indicating where the path might lie. Once more, she journeys into the forest. She thinks she has found her goal at last, in the totem pole paintings, which now bring her recognition and acceptance. But the totem poles are only signposts. She goes beyond them, into the true mystery, and it is there, in her spiritual transformation, that the journey reaches its conclusion.
At the end, Emily has become a wizard herself, and her magic—in the form of paintings and books—spreads outward to touch lives everywhere. The apotheosis comes only after her death, when she is elevated into a kind a myth herself, and what was a solitary journey by one woman becomes a story for all.
Emily Carr’s grave is under the trees in Victoria’s Ross Bay cemetery, on a sloping piece of land overlooking the waters she travelled so often. Her body lies there under a plain headstone, a part of Canada.
She once wrote these words in her journal:
Dear Mother Earth! I think I have always specially belonged to you. I have loved from babyhood to roll upon you, to lie with my face pressed right down on to you in my sorrows. I love the look of you and the smell of you and the feel of you. When I die I should like to be in you uncoffined, unshrouded, the petals of flowers against my flesh and you covering me up.
The marker on her grave gives no hint of the courage, the innovation, the talent, and the passion of an extraordinary person. It is a simple, small slab of stone. On it, her epitaph is engraved, modest, and to the point.
Emily Carr
Artist and Author
Lover of Nature
Somewhere, across the waters, in the deep green shadows of the forest, the totem poles and the giant trees still stand, and the spirit of a great artist still hovers around them.
CHRONOLOGY
1871
Emily Carr is born December 13, in Victoria, British Columbia.
1886
Her mother, also called Emily, dies.
1888
Her father, Richard Carr, dies.
1890–93
She attends the California School of Design in San Francisco.
1893–88
She teaches art to children in Victoria.
1899
She visits Ucluelet for the first time and acquires the name Klee Wyck.
1899
She attends the Westminster School of Art in London, England.
1900
She rejects an offer of marriage from Mayo Paddon.
1903
She stays at East Anglia Sanatorium for eighteen months after a nervous breakdown.
1904
Back in Victoria, she contributes political sketches to The Week.
1906
She takes on students in her studio in Vancouver. She meets Sophie Frank.
1907
On a trip to Alaska she sees totem poles for the first time.
1908
She embarks on sketching trips in British Columbia.
1910
She studies in France.
1912
Her French paintings are exhibited in her studio. She goes on a six-week sketching trip in northern British Columbia.
1913
Her “Indian” paintings are exhibited in her studio.
1913
She builds a boarding house in Victoria.
1914–EARLY 1920s
She manages the boarding house in Victoria.
1924
After a hiatus, she resumes painting, and exhibits her work in Seattle. She establishes a professional friendship with Mark Tobey.
1927
She exhibits in Ottawa and meets Lawren Harris and other members of the Group of Seven.
1928
She goes on a major sketching trip in British Columbia.
1929
She exhibits frequently and goes on a sketching trip on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
1930
She travels to Toronto, Ottawa, and New York, and makes her last trip to Native sites.
1932
She travels to Toronto and Chicago, and sketches in the British Columbia interior.
1937
She has her first heart attack, and starts writing seriously for the first time.
1939
She has a serious heart attack, and meets Ira Dilworth.
1941
Klee Wyck is published and wins the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.
1942
The Book of Small is published. She goes on her last sketching trip. A major exhibition of her work is held at the Art Gallery of Toronto.
1944
The House of All Sorts is published. She suffers a stroke, and writes her autobiography, Growing Pains.
1945
Emily dies in Victoria on March 2.
SOURCES
All the statements attributed to Emily Carr are taken from her own writings.
Blanchard, Paula. The Life of Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1987. A richly detailed and extensive account of Carr’s life.
Crean, Susan. The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2001. An imaginative and creative approach that combines fiction and history in its examination of many aspects of Emily Carr’s life.
Moray, Gerta. Unsettling Encounters: Fi
rst Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. The most thorough and extensive examination of Carr’s encounters with Native peoples.
Shadbolt, Doris. Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990. The best analysis of Carr’s paintings.
Tippett, Maria. Emily Carr: A Biography. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1985. A fine and sympathetic portrait of Emily Carr.
