droop of leaves having little more substance than cobwebs. But the old maple stump would not give up.”
Like Emily. Given little nourishment by her family or artistic community and barely ahead of the debt collector, she still had some small instinct for art that struggled to stay alive within her.
Emily liked to say that for the fifteen years she was active as a landlady, she never painted at all, but this is an exaggeration. Although she was discouraged, she managed to do some painting during this time. A few people, like Marius Barbeau, an anthropologist who studied B.C. native cultures for the federal government, and H. Mortimer Lamb, an important art collector in Vancouver, saw and appreciated the value of her work. Emily also continued to go on sketching trips, although they were closer to home than the ambitious trips of earlier years. She exhibited some paintings and made connection with several Seattle artists whom she could talk to about painting and art. But mostly, like the maple tree in her basement, she just hung on.
Now, all that was about to change.
8
Breakthrough
They had torn me; they had waked something in me that I had thought quite killed, the passionate desire to express some attribute of Canada.
– Emily Carr, Growing Pains
In August 1927 Emily received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as simply, “Eric Brown, Canadian National Gallery.” He wanted to speak to Miss Emily Carr about her Indian pictures. Emily was suspicious. Later she said she didn’t even know Canada had a national art gallery. Grudgingly she agreed that he and his wife could come to her studio to see the pictures on her walls, but while he talked, she sullenly eyed the lump of clay she had been working on.
Artist and member of the Canadian Group of Seven,
Lawren Harris, in front of Emily’s painting,
Silhouette No. 2. The night she met Harris she wrote, “Something has spoken to the very soul of me.”
As he looked at her paintings, Mr. Brown mentioned a new group of painters in Toronto who called themselves the Group of Seven. They were working like her, he said, in the modern, abstract style. Emily had never heard of them, but her ears perked up. A man named Fred Housser, Brown continued, had just written a book about the Group called, A Canadian Art Movement.
Then Eric Brown asked if he could have fifty of Emily’s pictures for an exhibition of West Coast art on native themes that he was planning for the National Gallery that winter.
Emily was dazed.
“Who did you say you were?”
Brown laughed. “Artists this side of the Rockies don’t keep up with art movements, do they?” he said. “Where did you study?”
“London, Paris, but I am not an artist any more.”
As soon as he left, Emily rushed downtown to buy Housser s book. Reading it, she could see that, like her, the Group of Seven were trying to free themselves of old European traditions, to develop a uniquely Canadian art nourished directly by Canadian soil. Instead of sitting in stuffy rooms or copying from photographs, they were actively out in the wilderness – mostly in northern Ontario but sometimes as far west as the coast – to camp and sketch, just as Emily had done.
She was moved by their story and sympathized with the fact that they, too, had suffered harsh criticisms. But when she saw the pictures in the book, especially of Lawren Harris’s painting, Above Lake Superior, she knew she had to meet these men.
Emily’s sisters told her to go; they would look after the boarding house and the animals. Emily wrote to Brown, “I can come,” and shipped off twenty-seven watercolours and eleven oil paintings along with several hooked rugs and pottery pieces. Brown, Director of the National Gallery, had promised that if she came, he would give her a free railway pass that would let her stop in Toronto to meet the Group of Seven before she came to Ottawa.
In Toronto, everyone was kind, though they hadn’t yet seen her work, and the Women’s Art Association showed her around to the studios of the various members of the Group, beginning with A.Y. Jackson.
Emily felt an immediate kinship, although, looking at Jackson’s paintings of native subjects, she felt “a little as if beaten at my own game.” His work seemed to have a rhythm that hers lacked. “Mine are so downright,” she mourned. Until now, her major effort had been to paint the totem poles, and she had been careful to be exact in reproducing them. But the historical record she made and offered to the public had been rejected. Now she was free to respond more personally to the totem poles. Next time she painted them, she promised herself, she would let go and paint from her heart.
“I’m going off on a tangent tear,” she said. “There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness…, the eternal big spaceness of it. Oh the West! I’m of it and I love it.”
Then she visited the studios of Arthur Lismer, whose paintings gave her a feeling of “exhilaration and joy.” Technically, she felt the Groups work was better than hers. “I’m way behind them in drawing,” she wrote “and in composition and rhythm and planes, but I know inside me what they’re after and I feel that per-haps, given a chance, I could get it too.”
Emily wondered if these men felt the Emily Carr_common chord she felt between them and her. “No,” she told herself, “I don’t believe they feel so toward a woman.” But oh, how she yearned!
There were no women members of the Group of Seven, and Emily was one of what was still a tiny group of serious women painters in Canada. In the 1920s everyone assumed that to be an artist, you had to be a man, just as we used to think that to be a carpenter, you had to be a man, or to be a nurse, you had to be a woman.
Women artists were not taken seriously because “everyone knew” women couldn’t paint. The mere fact that they were women blinded almost everyone – women and men alike – to their skill. The result was that women’s art was rarely displayed or bought, so that a woman like Emily could hardly make a living by her art.
This was discouraging enough, but there was something equally hard; when everyone says you can’t do something, it’s amazing how much you start to believe them, even if you don’t want to. Stubborn, rebellious Emily had fought to prove that a woman could be a good artist, but the public and her own fam-ily and many of her teachers, including Olsson in England and Gibb in France, reminded her that she was “only” an exception to the rule – until she almost believed them.
Emily had also fought a lonely battle with the other painters in Victoria over the importance of abstract art. Most of them laughed at her “modern” designs and colours.
Now suddenly she had met a whole group of men, the Group of Seven, who seemed to agree with her, who felt as she did about art, and about Canada, and she desperately hoped she could fit in with them, “put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end.”
She was overwhelmed by the
