and Alice – were very different from Emily and each of the three women was impatient and critical with the others, but they were tied to each other by the bonds of family, habit, and affection. It pained Emily that her sisters didn’t like her art in the ways she wished they would, although she still thought they were “the finest women ever.”
All three sisters lived within easy walking distance of each other on the original family acreage, so it was easy to get together every Sunday at Alice’s school-house for dinner, for birthdays, and for Christmases. As long as she was a landlady, Emily also tromped over for frequent lunches and to visit.
Over lunch, as she recited the latest atrocities of her tenants, Alice would say little, Lizzie would side with the tenant, and there would be a clash. Usually Emily was told to behave as a good landlady and sent right back, and she felt yet again like the unsuccessful black sheep of the family. But her sisters remained her closest friends, and it was a great joy to her when, in 1933, Alice finally said that she thought some of Emily’s sketches were “wonderful.” Lizzie later also saw something she liked in Emily’s work for the first time.
Other old friends included Willie Newcombe, the son of Dr. Newcombe who had inspected Emily’s paintings for the provincial government in 1912. Willie was a friend, a naturalist, and a handyman.
Flora Burns was the daughter of one of Emily’s earliest supporters in Victoria. In the 1920s, when Flora and Emily confessed to each other that they both liked to write, they took a correspondence course together. They read their short stories to one another and exchanged criticisms. Later, Ruth Humphrey, an English teacher at Victoria College, and Margaret Clay, a librarian at the Victoria Public Library, also gave Emily feedback on her stories. Emily called them her “listening ladies.”
Their job was mostly to cheer Emily on – a role with which Emily felt comfortable. She didn’t like competition or criticism, which may be partly why her friendships with several young Victoria artists in the 1930s were not very happy. Max Maynard, Jack Shadbolt (later one of Canada’s leading painters), and John McDonald all liked to come to her studio, see her latest work, and talk about art. All three thought her work some of the best in the province and acknowledged her influence on their own art.
But their easy male confidence intimidated her. Emily was always uncomfortable with art criticism, and as the men talked – “spouting jargon” as she called it – she felt more and more stupid. She became increasingly abrupt with them. When she saw signs of her influence in their work, rather than take it as a compliment (young artists modelling on an older one), she was sure they were stealing her ideas.
Part of her defensiveness may have had to do with arrogance on their part. Maynard once told her women can’t paint. Emily, he quickly explained, was an exception. But Emily had heard too much of this sort of talk before. When the men moved to Vancouver, she found it easier to be friendly from a distance.
Always, if Emily felt under attack, she snapped back. She could be a good friend, but she lost her temper easily – and was often sorry after. In her fear of being rejected, she rejected others first, before they could reject her – or her work. The one artist with whom she was close at this time was Edythe Hembroff. They met when Emily read in the newspaper that Edythe had just come back from studying art in France, and invited her to tea. The two were different in many ways but they liked each other immediately, and for three years they painted together almost every day.
During the early 1930s Emily became distanced from the members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because of her own sharp temper and her quickness to feel slighted, but partly also it was her increasing confidence in her own work.
Officially, the Group had dissolved and formed a larger organization, the Canadian Group of Painters, of which Emily was a charter member. In 1933 when she sent sixteen of her new paint and paper sketches east for their comments, Emily was disappointed in their feedback. She thought the freshness and courage of their earlier painting was gone and that none of them had changed their style, while Emilys continued to develop. For years she had been dependent on their criticisms but soon she would write in her journal, “Now they are torn away and I stand alone,” (“alone” was underlined), “on my own perfectly good feet. Now I take my own soul as my critic.”
She even suffered a cooling (though never an end) to her relationship with Lawren Harris. When Bess Housser and Lawren Harris announced their plan to divorce their spouses and marry each other, Emily was deeply offended. She always held conservative sexual attitudes and although she liked them both, she felt she couldn’t trust them again. Harris continued to write to Emily, and (after 1940, when he and Bess moved to Vancouver,) to visit her, but their relationship was never the same.
This was partly because Emily was beginning to see some of the differences between Harris’s work and goals and her own. His paintings, she thought, were too cold, too finished, almost static. “They take you to their destination and leave you,” she said. In her own work, movement was now all-important. She was trying to make her paintings express the heat of “growing, not stopping, being still on the move.”
But she never stopped acknowledging his importance to her. Just before her death she wrote of him that his “work and example did more to influence my outlook upon art than any school or any master.”
Emily was developing a new style, one in which rhythm was dominant. Perhaps as a reflection of her growing spiritual confidence in the “continuous process of life, eternally changing,” her paintings lighten. Space is no longer heavily carved but moves. In 1930 in New York she had seen Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit series of paintings. Now, in the canvas, Tree, Emily, like O’Keeffe, focuses the viewer in tight, to a single aspect of the tree, emphasizing the grace of its rising trunk with only a glimpse of green draperies falling around it. This painting also shares the feeling of inner tension of the totem poles. When describing forest, she exclaimed how it affected her, “surging with being, palpitating with overpowering, terrific life, life, life.” Emily also began to look above the trees to the sky, which she sought to make “roomy and moving and mysterious.” She still painted totem poles – mostly from older sketches – but this work, too, showed a new confidence, a new rhythm, as if she was now seeing the totem poles through her own eyes.
Until now, her sketching trips around Victoria had been limited by where she could find a cabin to rent, but in 1933 she solved that problem. Ever since she was a child reading stories about the gypsies or Roma people, she had dreamed of owning a caravan. Now, with the proceeds from the sale of one of her paintings, she bought a rickety trailer, dubbed it “the Elephant,” and built in it a bed for herself, sleeping spaces for the animals, a meat safe, kerosene stove, and bookshelves. She also built a large canvas tarpaulin on one side where she could cook and heat the water for her hot water bottle on rainy days.
Now every spring and fall Emily had the Elephant towed to some place near Victoria where she spent several weeks sketching. She felt, she said, like “Mrs. Noah” with all her creatures – including Woo the monkey, happily ensconced in a tree, and Susie the rat, tucked into a corner in her oatmeal container.
Susie travelled everywhere with Emily, partly because no one else could stand her. Lizzie and Alice had finally come to accept Woo, the monkey, even though she once kept Alice cornered for hours in the back shed. But a rat was a rat, and the sisters wouldn’t have it near them. So Susie stayed in the oatmeal carton or kept Emily company inside the collar of her jacket as Emily sketched. The animal was so devoted that she wouldn’t leave, even if the Elephant’s door was left open. In Victoria, if her cage in the studio was not securely locked at night, she’d struggle up the steep studio stairs to sleep on Emily’s pillow.
