Emily Carr: Waiting for the World to Catch Up

By Dzeraldina Zigic

In her autobiography, Growing Pains, the painter Emily Carr indignantly related how French painters of the time dismissed the landscape of her Western Canadian home as "unpaintable." She was determined to prove them wrong. Ultimately, she did - though, because she was ahead of her time, success for this disobedient Victorian woman was a long time coming.

Carr, who lived from 1871 to 1945, is now recognized as one of the most influential Canadian landscape painters. She pursued an ever more modern and abstract style despite her geographic and cultural remoteness from the art hubs of New York and Paris.

The first nationally touring exhibition of Carr's work in more than thirty years is currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. "Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon" examines Carr's legacy and provides the social and political contexts in which her work evolved. In addition to the 150 works by Carr herself, the exhibition includes works from First Nations cultures of the Pacific Northwest, who influenced Carr considerably. "New Perspectives" is divided into three sections: the first stresses the importance of First Nations art in the region; the second focuses on Carr's modernism and spiritual interpretations of nature; and the third reveals aspects of what might be called Carr's environmentalism.

Carr wrote in her autobiography that she had been born during the early Victorian era when actions such as "swimming on Sunday, singing in the cow yard, and confronting her iron-willed English father" were unforgivable sins. Nonetheless, she found the courage to repeatedly question her father's authority, though, in so doing, she risked the disapproval of the only person who may have ever understood and loved her - Carr's mother.

Still, she enjoyed her early childhood, and was ultimately allowed to take drawing lessons at the local private school, having proven herself worthy with a drawing of a dog on an old brown bag. She built her first easel from an old cherry tree, and recalls one of her sisters swiping it from her - an act she perceived as emblematic of her siblings' lack of support for her art throughout her life.

Carr's account is filled with references to the misery her sisters inflicted on her with their comments: the frames were too good for her art, they said; or, they had to sit at lunch with their backs to her paintings because it made them sick to look at them and eat at the same time.

Her parents died when Carr was in her teens and, feeling estranged from her family, she frequently sought solace in the wild forests of British Columbia on the back of her old horse Johnny. The deep, energetic, life-rich green which she found there would remain Carr's obsession for the rest of her life.

Carr soon came in contact with the people and art of British Columbia's indigenous cultures, particularly their totem poles. Living on the edge of Victorian society with no use for the old, snobby English rules, Carr felt an affinity for these simple-living but highly spirited people, by whom she was called Klee Wyck - the Laughing One. This is the title she would give her collection of autobiographical stories about her encounters with the First Peoples, which she wrote near the end of her life. She learned from them that every piece of nature has a spirit imprisoned deep inside it. Carving a totem meant setting a spirit free by removing the deceiving surface. Carr started painting depictions of totems but felt unable to free the spirit beneath. She became frustrated with the medium deemed only appropriate for women - watercolors - and the idea that they expressed a necessarily feminine softness and fragility. She was a woman, but steady and full of energy. She needed oil paints, but they were reserved for Victorian male artists.

Searching for the "right" ways to paint Canada's wildness, Carr went to London but came back discouraged by the rigidity of Victorian society and almost abandoned art. Then she heard about the new abstract way of painting. She took out all her savings and bought a ticket to Paris.

Carr recalled that in Paris, she observed and learned but felt that the avant-garde painted only surfaces without seeing the depth beneath. So she started painting her own familiar subject, nature, with new "shadows": her old, purely representational spirits became dark green, energetic, deeply mystical, and free. Her new style's innovations surpassed even those of the European abstract modernists.

All her life, Carr fought against strict, unnecessary, woman-suppressing Victorian rules, and for the pure freedom embodied in the unspoiled nature of British Columbia. In her paintings, Carr had the solitude of Georgia O'Keeffe, the desperation of Frida Kahlo, and the passion of Tamara De Lempicka, but she was always her own unique Emily Carr, proud Canadian patiently waiting for the rest of the world to wake up and see.

Dzeraldina Zigic is a graphic designer in Burlington.