Emily Carr (11 page)

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.

Emily did not take an intellectual approach to art, but she was by no means ignorant of modern trends. She had many books with titles such as
How to See Modern Art, The New Art, Painters of the Modern Mind,
and
Western Art and the New Era
. Many of the passages in these books were underlined and annotated by her.

During the 1920s she was often visited in Victoria by artists from Seattle and Vancouver. As well as her trips to Toronto, where she met with Harris and others, she visited New York and Chicago and made the rounds of the galleries there. She met Georgia O'Keeffe, another innovative woman painter who drew her inspiration from nature. Emily was also given a private tour of a collection of avant-garde paintings by Katherine Drier, an author and connoisseur. How much of what she saw directly influenced her is debatable. Carr, like most artists, was concerned with the task at hand. If an idea was useful to her own immediate concerns, she noted it. If not, then it had no effect. Both the ruminations of critics and the judgment of history were irrelevant to her.

Her career as a painter falls into a rough sequence of styles. First were the landscapes done in the English tradition, and
then the documentary studies of Native motifs. With her return from France, a new vigour in the brush strokes and a brightness of colour are evident. After the meetings with Harris and the Group of Seven, there is a simplification of form and a stronger emotional content. The paintings become dramatic and symbolic. Finally, in her late style, she comes out of the forest into the sky: the paintings are full of movement and energy.

How is a painting made? Well, you find something you want to paint. It might be a tree, or an apple, or your own face. You use a pencil to make a drawing. Very difficult, even if it is just an apple you are trying to draw. Then you take some colour and apply it. But what colour? How much? How to mix that particular tone? How to blend the brush strokes? What to do about the background? Very difficult.

But how to actually make a painting? Most of Emily's oil paintings were based on sketches that she made directly in the landscape. She would begin with a pencil drawing. No doubt she had a little tray of watercolours and a pad that she could hold on her lap. Once the drawing was done, she applied the colours. The paint dried as quickly as the water evaporated. First impressions and sensations were what counted at this stage. These sketches might have taken just a few minutes, or much longer if close observation was important, as it was
when she wanted to get the exact details of a totem pole. She was always scrupulous about that. In the paintings made before 1927 she always strove for accuracy and exactness, with the idea in mind that she was making a record for history.

Later, in the studio, she used these little watercolours as the basis for her big oil paintings. During the winter months she would cut pieces of lumber, mitre the corners, and assemble a frame on which a piece of canvas would be stretched. She then applied a ground of white paint to the canvas to seal it and provide a smooth surface. Once this had dried, she could begin working up one of the summer sketches onto the canvas. She would make a simple outline with a brush dipped in thinned paint. Sometimes she changed the composition from the one in the sketch, because reality doesn't always arrange itself into a pleasing layout. When she was satisfied with the composition, she would begin to block in the basic shapes with colour.

She preferred to work in privacy—a thoughtless comment from an onlooker could ruin her concentration and sow doubt. Often she would sit and look at a canvas for long hours without lifting the brush. She wanted the painting to speak to her, to reveal what it was becoming. She did the same thing when she was in the landscape itself, sitting and looking, listening to her inner voice and the voice of
the forest. Sometimes she failed to hear what she was listening for, and gave up. But she always came back; she always persevered.

A close-up view of one of her paintings reveals that the way she used paint was not in the least bit naïve or accidental. In some parts the paint is thin; in others, thicker patches are placed to catch the light or emphasize a texture. Colours are very subtly placed next to each other, as when a violet or orange appears in the midst of a swath of green. In some sections the colour is intense and pure, then it becomes restrained and suggestive. The abstraction of the forms, the selection of viewpoint and focus—all are refined and deliberate. Like a violinist drawing all the nuances out of the strings, from the most forceful march to the most delicate pizzicato, she used her brush as a delicate instrument, not only as a tool but also as an extension of her very self.

Often, as they get older, artists develop a more fluid, almost impatient style, with a very loose brush stroke. One sees it in the last works of Rembrandt, Titian, and Picasso. They are aware of their failing health and fading eyesight. At this stage, an artist has achieved perfect technical mastery. The movement of the painter's hand becomes quick. Attention is directed toward achieving the big effect, going straight to the heart of the matter. Detail is either subordinated or ignored.

There is no time for equivocation. At the very end of her career, Emily switched to using paper instead of canvas as the support, and cheaper paints thinned to a liquid consistency with turpentine, and on occasion, gasoline. Contrary to the myths about Carr, she did not do this out of poverty, but in order to be able to work out of doors on a large scale in oil paint. An oil painting usually takes days, or even weeks, to dry, but thinned and applied to paper, the paint would have some of the same properties as watercolour in its liquidity and drying time.