Sophie put on her best skirt of plaid and black velvet and tied a yellow scarf around her head, and they would visit the graveyard with its collection of tiny gravestones belonging to Sophie’s many dead babies. One of them was named after Emily. Then they might walk to the church where Emily, although she was not Catholic, had the priest’s permission to cross herself with holy water and kneel with Sophie in front of the candles burning on the altar.
A portrait of Sophie hung in Emily’s studio. “There is a bond between us,” Emily said, “where color, creed, environment don’t count. The woman in us meets on Emily Carr_common ground and we love each other.”3 They remained friends until Sophie’s death in 1939.
The other way Emily eased her loneliness was by spending weekends with her sisters in Victoria. As long as they stayed at a certain distance from each other, they all seemed to get along.
In 1907, Emily and Alice took the Alaskan cruise on which Emily first saw the totem poles of Alert Bay and Sitka. It was on this trip that she decided to paint what she saw as the vanishing heritage of British Columbia’s First Nations.
The next summer and again in 1909 as soon as school ended, she boarded a steamship and, with Billie for company, sailed up the coast of Vancouver Island to Alert Bay, Campbell River, and to other Kwakwaka’wakw settlements that had a strong tradition of carving.4 On the mainland she travelled to Sechelt, Hope, Yale, and Lytton. She painted the large native community houses with their dramatic faces and the totem poles, always trying to be as precise and photographic as possible, because, she felt, she was working “for history.” By this time Emily was signing her paintings, “M. Emily Carr” or “M. Carr” or “M.E. Carr” to carefully distinguish herself from the other “E. Carrs,” Edith and Elizabeth. Toward the end of her career her paintings were usually signed simply, “Emily Carr.” By then there was no doubt, there was only one.
In 1908 Emily was a founding member of the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, but many of the artists there found her abrasive and hard to get along with. In fact, she was beginning to get a reputation as being a bit odd. She didn’t seem to care what people thought of her – or rather, she defied people to think whatever they liked. For Vancouverites, this was probably her greatest sin. Once, when a student caught her scrubbing her studio floor dressed in her bathing suit, Emily only laughed. People found it strange that she was always surrounded by animals.
And then there was her subject matter. Other artists had painted native villages before, but Miss Carr, they said, actually lived with the Indians while she painted them! Emily, who liked to shock, didn’t object to any of the growing talk about her. Most Indians seemed to accept her more easily than white people did, and she was always happier in small villages and in the forest than in big cities.
Vancouver art critics praised her work, but Emily wasn’t happy with it. She knew she had much more to learn. She had been to London. Now, she decided, she had saved enough money from her teaching to go to Paris where the “real” art was taking place. Alice would go with her as her translator. They arrived in Paris in August, 1910.
3 . Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, p. 108.
4 . At the time, the people there were called Kwakiutl, which is the anglicized form of Kwakwaka’wakw, pronounced Kwak-WAK-ya-wak.
6
Finding color
I tramped the country-side, sketch sack on shoulder. The fields were lovely, lying like a spread of gay patchwork against red-gold wheat, cool, pale oats, red-purple of new-turned soil, green, green grass, and orderly, well-trimmed trees.
– Emily Carr, Growing Pains
As soon as they settled in their flat in Montparnasse, Emily and Alice went to see the man to whom Emily had been given a letter of introduction. His name was Harry Gibb. At first Emily was shocked when he showed her his “modern” paintings. Alice couldn’t even bear to look. The figures weren’t realistic but distorted – and they pulsed with wild, unnatural colour. This was the “New Art” that everyone either loved or hated, and it was what Emily had come to find.
My Bed, Somewhere in France. Emily is fascinated by the New Art she learns in France, particularly its use of bold colour, surging rhythm, and distorted perspective to convey emotion.
After the first shock, she found the pictures exciting. They made traditional art look dull and unconvincing. She wanted to know how she too, could paint in this style. Gibb recommended the Académie Colarossi where Whistler, Rodin, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani, and Matisse had all studied and where male and female students could work together. At many schools, this was unacceptable, but Gibb thought Emily would benefit from working beside what he called “the stronger work of men.” Emily had found another reluctant mentor who didn’t have a high opinion of the work of women artists.
But he was the perfect contact. Paris in 1910 was bristling with painters, writers, and artists of all kinds who would one day be very well known, and Gibb knew most of them. He had sold Henri Matisse’s first painting and exhibited his own works with artists like Pierre Bonnard, Georges Seurat, and Edouard Manet. Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, and Matisse were among his close friends.
Emily and Alice lived in the Latin Quarter, one of the most exciting parts of Paris at this time, but, as if it had taken all their courage and adventurous spirit just to get there, they were strictly conservative in their socializing. They didn’t seek out the renegade galleries that were showing Matisse and Gauguin. They didn’t eat at nearby local cafes where the Russians, Leon Trotsky and Wassily Kandinsky, played chess or where Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso ate and argued. And they didn’t seek out the galleries where the paintings of artists like Matisse, Duchamp, and Léger were shocking the art world.
Instead, they socialized at the American Student Hostel Club and ate only at the cafés where other English and North Americans ate. Partly, no doubt, this was because of language; Emily said Alice could speak French but wouldn’t, and Emily couldn’t. Whatever their reasons, they stayed carefully sheltered behind a curtain of English.
Art school was another matter. At the Académie Colarossi, Emily, at thirty-eight the oldest in the class, didn’t speak a word of French, and no one there spoke English. She could only understand the critiques she was given through the hand and facial gestures of the teacher. Also, at this time the class was all men, and she missed other women. “There was not even a woman model,” she noted.
One day she heard a good Anglo-Saxon “Damn!” behind her and turned to see a student furiously rip the lining from his pocket to use for a paint rag. They made a deal: Emily would provide clean paint rags in return for translation services. In this way she found out the teacher thought she had a good colour sense and was doing very well.
But the English speaker didn’t attend class often enough, so she moved to the studio of a Scottish artist, John Fergusson, where English was not a problem. Fergusson had been greatly influenced by the Fauve school. These were the artists, like Matisse, who used distorted perspective and brilliant colour to convey emotion. A critic once called them “wild beasts” or “fauves” in French, and the name stuck.
