Emily Carr (10 page)

On her painting trips, when she went to the northern forests, a dog always accompanied her. Cougars and bears inhabited the forests, and there were semi-feral dogs and cats near the Native villages. Emily's own dogs served not only as companions on her solitary excursions, but also as sentinels and guardians.

A portrait of Billy, her sheepdog, completed in 1909 and rendered with great sensitivity and skill, shows that Emily could have had a career as an animal painter. But, except for two paintings of the monkey, Woo, made when Emily was in her sixties, and a few early watercolours of parrots, there are no other paintings of animals in her entire output. The fact that she did not paint her countless pets is curious. But then, she didn't paint people much either.

Depictions of friends and family, creatures and pets, are reserved for the other side of Emily's creative output: the comical drawings and her writings. Emily might at times have been melancholy, or irritable, but she had a tremendous sense of humour. We see this in her cartoons, where she lampoons not only those around her, but also herself. Her paintings have a gravitas to them, but the cartoons and verses show
the other side of her personality. The same might be said of the photographs. Usually they show a rather sober woman, but when the photographs capture an unposed moment, she is often smiling and laughing. Her smile is often either mischievous or radiates great warmth. And, after all, hadn't she once been called Klee Wyck, the laughing one?

There is a popular misconception that Emily wandered the streets of Victoria in bohemian garb, with her monkey perched on her shoulder. It is an image that has been promulgated in films, children's books, and biographical sketches, and it has contributed to the picture of her as an eccentric. The image is colourful, but erroneous. At home, the monkey often scampered loose, and Emily dressed as she pleased, but she always had a strong sense of propriety. When she went out she always dressed appropriately, in a manner befitting a middle-aged matron from an established family.

But what of the monkey? Who was Woo?

Around 1923, when she was in her early fifties, Emily saw a Javanese monkey caged in a pet shop. She rescued the creature by purchasing it. Emily named the monkey Woo, after the sound it made, and this little creature would be her constant companion for the next thirteen of its fifteen years, until they were separated by old age.

Emily made only two paintings of Woo. One dates from the early 1930s and shows Woo standing upright, holding onto a branch with her hands. She is wearing a yellow pinafore that has an enormous bow on the back. The face, shown in profile, is remarkably human.

Emily did dress her monkey in a pinafore on occasion, especially during the wet cold months. Java is a tropical country, and Emily was concerned for Woo's health. No doubt when Woo was dressed up, the temptation to see this lively, affectionate, mischievous creature as a kind of little girl would have been irresistible. And, perhaps Emily also saw a part of herself in Woo: that independent little girl who was once known as Small.

There is another painting of Woo, done much later, perhaps one of the last pictures Emily did. The first Woo is made to seem human, but in the later painting she stares back at the viewer, defiant and wild. No sweet little girl in this creature. Against a background of swirling branches and green fruit, an untamed animal looks out at us with blazing yellow eyes. This is a creature from the other world, that we glimpse only rarely, where Emily trod more often than most of us ever will. Perhaps this is a self-portrait, showing her dark and moody side.

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.

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.

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.