where she – busy running a boarding house instead of painting – had become a “quitter.” She didn’t talk about the fact that the men in the Group were able to sell their paintings to support themselves or that Lawren Harris, their leader, was the son of wealthy Thomas Harris of the Massey-Harris Company that manufactured farm machinery.
It was Lawren Harris’s work that moved her most. When she visited his studio he brought out painting after painting for her to look at. Emily was struck dumb by the strong feeling of spirituality in his work, the sense that he had not only found what she called “God” in the wilderness but that he had been able to translate that feeling into pictures. As Harris continued to show her his work, he paid her the highest compliment one artist can give another: he invited her to criticize it.
“If you see anything you can suggest,” he said, “just mention it, will you?” Emily was deeply moved.
“Me? I know nothing,” she said.
“You are one of us,” was his reply.
That night she lay awake crying and writing in her journal, “Oh, God, what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world….Something has called out of somewhere. Something in me is trying to answer.”
Lawren Harris invited her to visit his studio again on her way home, and Emily could hardly wait to take him up on it, but first there was the Exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa that she had come for in the first place. In Ottawa she stayed with Marius Barbeau and his family. They arrived together for the opening.
It was, Emily reported, horrid. Usually two thousand people were invited to the opening of a new exhibition, but for this one, Eric Brown only sent invita-tions to a few artists and the people who worked in the building. He wanted it to be informal, he said. The exhibition was entitled “Canadian West Coast Art Native and Modern,” and the majority of the exhibits were Emilys. When people said nice things about her work, she could hardly believe them. Compared to the native work and the Group’s paintings, she thought, her landscapes looked stiff and her colours garish. But she had to admit to her journal that perhaps her work had one thing the Group’s lacked, particularly when they painted the West, and that was “the love in them of the people and the country” that hers had. “It was my own country,” she wrote, “part of the West and me.” She was beginning to see that perhaps she did, indeed, have something special to offer; that her vision and experience of western Canada were unique.
On her way home, Emily again stopped in Toronto to visit Harris. She was very nervous. What right had she to take up this busy man’s time? But her need to talk to him and especially, to see again his painting, Above Lake Superior, overcame her fears.
When she phoned, Harris not only invited her to his studio the next day, but he invited her to dinner that night. He showed her more paintings, and with his wife, they listened to a symphony on his gramophone. Emily had felt what she called the “holiness” in his work, and now she said, “to sit in front of those pictures and hear that music was just about heaven.”
The next day, December 13, was – coincidentally – her birthday, and it made “a splendid birthday.” But it was more than that. Later Emily would say “that long talk in Lawren Harris’s studio was the pivot on which turned my entire life.”
They talked about the craft of painting. Harris showed her some of the techniques he used, like rubbing raw linseed oil into the canvas before he painted, to make the colours brighter. He also told her more about the Group’s ideals and their goal of developing a distinctively Canadian art, not through schools or tradition but out of the land itself, by direct contact with nature.
Most importantly, Harris talked about his spiritual beliefs, especially about theosophy. Theosophy is a religious belief that rejects traditional Christian belief in the divinity of Christ or the power of prayer. It comes from a mix of Eastern and Western religious philosophies and holds that the world is a part of God and that God – the divine – can be directly known through nature. As a theosophist, Harris believed that art was not just an intellectual exercise, but an emotional, intuitive response to the divine spirit in nature.
Emily was electrified. Although she was always deeply spiritual, she hadn’t been able to bear the snooty hypocrisy she often saw in the church, and she hadn’t attended regularly since she had come home from England. It wasn’t in church that she felt closest to the divine but outside, in her beloved northwest. She knew that Harris’s work had something hers lacked, something she had been searching for. Talking with him made her wonder if perhaps she too might find in nature the God she’d “longed and hunted for and failed to find,” the one Harris had found.
From her youth on, she had had a vague desire to create an art unique to the Canadian northwest, but she was never sure exactly how to go about it. Now she had permission to try. Someone was encouraging her to explore the spiritual aspects of the West Coast landscape.
Harris said, “I understand you have not painted for some time?”
“No.”
“Are you going to now?”
“Yes.”
Emily was no longer alone. She knew how far she had to go but finally she had a glimpse of where that place might be. She was on fire to get home and paint.
Before she left, Harris gave her a list of books she could read. “You are isolated out there,” he said. “Keep in touch with us.” And he told her that as soon as he saw her paintings, he would write.
On the long train ride back across Canada, Emily worried. Did being a landlady make her small and bitter, incapable of great art? What would the Group, especially Harris, think of her work when the Ottawa show came to Toronto? Was it good enough? Would they like it? And she was old – almost fifty-six years old. Was it too late? Or was it maybe possible that, if she worked very hard, her art might get better so even her sisters would think it wasn’t one big waste of time?
Back in Victoria, she impatiently dealt with chores and sick dogs and Christmas parcels and cleaning. Then, finally, she brought out some of the early Indian pictures and began to paint.
A letter arrived from Toronto. In it, Lawren Harris wrote, “The exhibition of West Coast Art is at the Gallery. As interesting a show as we have had in the Gallery. Your work is impressive, more so than Lismer had led me to believe, though he was genuinely moved by it in Ottawa. I really have, nor can have, nothing to say by way of criticism….The pictures are works of art in their own right…have creative life in them…they breathe.’
Emily was thrilled. From now on, her job as a landlady would take second place. To heck with cleaning. She hauled out her sketch sack, called her dogs, and headed into the woods again, an artist, “singing.”
Indian Church by Emily Carr, 1929. Lawren Harris bought this painting and hung it in his house.
9
Finding Forest
