Mother Earth! I think I have always specially belonged to you.
– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands
Emily began to exchange regular letters with Lawren Harris. With him, she could be entirely open in talking about art.
Harris found her sketches “vigorous, alive, creative” and urged her to “keep at it.” (This was particularly generous of him given that, by 1932, he himself had almost stopped painting.) He told her that her paintings were unique in Canada. “Their spirit, feeling, design, handling, is different and tremendously expressive of the British Columbia Coast – its spirit,” he wrote, “perhaps far more than you realize….” And he urged her not to let feelings of isolation or depression slow her down. “In despair again?” he replied to one of her letters. “Every creative individual despairs….No matter how fine the things are, there are always finer things to be done…Keep on working, change your approach, perhaps, but don’t change your attitude.”
Back in British Columbia, Emily was excited to be working with the northern sketches again but she needed new material. In 1928 she scraped together enough money for another trip to northern Vancouver Island, the Skeena and Nass Valleys, and Haida Gwaii. By this time she had changed from raising English bobtails in her kennel to raising smaller griffon dogs. One of her favourites, Ginger Pop, came with her.
It was a rough journey. It rained almost unceasingly, and when it stopped raining, the mosquitoes came out. Emily spent long periods of time waiting for transportation to the next village, wearing her mosquito armour: a long dress, thick canvas pantaloons on her legs, two pairs of gloves, and a cheesecloth veil over her head with a pane of glass inserted for her to see through.
On this trip, lots went wrong. Weather on Haida Gwaii, for example, was so bad that she couldn’t sketch any of the villages she’d hoped for, but she was undaunted and managed to reach enough villages, including Kitwancool and Greenville, to make several new sketches and consider her trip a success.
When she returned to Victoria, a young Seattle artist asked if she could gather a class in Victoria for him to teach. His name was Mark Tobey. He was an excellent teacher and his lessons had a great impact on her. Emily grumbled that his theories all sounded rather like “painting to recipe,’ but it was from Tobey she learned that “Nothing stands alone; each is only a part. A picture must be a portrayal of relationships.”
Like Emily, Tobey was deeply interested in Northwest Coast native art. Many of the principles he taught her, she had already seen in the totem poles; for example, although almost all poles were true to the shape of the tree, the carver seemed to manage the illusion of even greater height and diameter. Totem poles also appeared to hold a sense of drama and inner tension so the carved figures seemed to press out against the surface. Emily applied this lesson to her recent paintings, including Totem Mother from Kitwancool. She was beginning to show objects not merely sitting in a landscape, but shining, as if with some power or light, from inside.
In 1929 Lawren Harris suggested that Emily stop working from native material and go directly to the forest for her inspiration. “For a little while at least,” he wrote, “give up Indian motifs. Perhaps you have become too dependent on them; create forms for yourself, direct from nature.” And in fact Emily admitted later that “while working on the Indian stuff I felt a little that I was but copying the Indian idiom instead of expressing my own findings.”
Perhaps in those early days when Emily felt isolated and uncertain of her right as a woman to paint, painting the totem poles helped justify her commitment to art. From the time she first saw the standing poles in Sitka in 1907, she knew, instinctively, that First Nations carving and design were important. If people said she had no right as a woman to paint what she wanted, maybe she could justify her art by saying, “It’s not for me. Its for the poles.”
Harris was encouraging her – clearly giving her permission – to step out and paint from her own core. The poles had been precious teachers to Emily, but now, forest itself began to move to the foreground for her. “I learned a lot from the Indians,” she said, “but who except Canada herself could help me comprehend her great woods and spaces?” By 1930 the D’Sonoqua she painted from Koskimo village was barely visible amidst green growth, almost smothered by the dense foliage.
In the spring of 1929 Emily took a train north, then west on Vancouver Island to Port Alberni, where she boarded a steamer north to Nootka Island. One of the sketches she did here was of a one-room native church. Back in Victoria she changed its environment a little: she painted white crosses around the church as if it were surrounded by a graveyard. She ignored the other buildings that were there in order to emphasize the isolation of the church, alone against the sweep of tall trees. She added a breath of danger. In the final painting, Indian Church, dark slices of undergrowth rush like green waves up to the front door of the small, white church. And yet it stands, holding its cross like a wobbling Christian soldier, almost burning with a clear interior light – a Lawren Harris light – against the green waves that threaten to drown it.
By simplifying – almost carving – the forms of trees, by immersing herself in the power symbolized by both church and forest, Emily was beginning to portray the inner spirit she sought. Perhaps it is no coincidence this painting was bought by Lawren Harris, who praised it lavishly, saying Emily would probably never do better. He said it so often that she finally got mad at him, saying she certainly would do even better paintings in future!
Like most Europeans, Emily had a difficult relationship with forest. Once she stepped past the edge and moved into its dark interior, it frightened her. Although she was born in British Columbia and loved forest, it was – it is still – wild, foreign ground. There are no trodden paths except those travelled by animals. On the coast in particular, the light is often dim and diffuse – as if things are seen in a dream. Sound is different, too. On windy days, trees creak and roar as loud as any ocean surf. There are infinite small sounds – tiny scuttle of beetles, harsh call of a crow or eagle, drip of rain – all set like minute lights against the backdrop of such a profound, dark silence that every crackle of underbrush, each snap of a twig, is magnified. In dense forest, there is the sense of something alive – something invisible – a pulse beneath one’s feet. Emily was often afraid.
Yet she loved trees better than people. “It is funny,” she said later, “how I sought my companionship out in woods and trees rather than in persons. It was as if they had hit and hurt me and made me mad, and cut me off, so that I went howling back like a smacked child to Mother Nature.”
She came seeking sanctuary, but it was a foreign church. Trees, like drapery, hung low. If she screamed, no one would hear. The ground was often overgrown with head-high bracken and sharp underbrush so she couldn’t pass. Holes, rocks, tree roots all lay half-hidden to slow her heavy progress with camp stool and sketch sack as she looked for a clearing, a place to sit and work. The smell was of growth, decay, and rich, wet humus.
In working on the painting of D’Sonoqua called Strangled by Growth, she sought to portray the dark side of this forest. It was a picture, she said, of “ferocious, strangled lonesomeness…creepy, nervy, forsaken, dank, dirty, dilapidated, the rank smell of nettles and rotting wood, the lush greens of the rank sea grass and the overgrown bushes, and the great dense forest behind full of unseen things and great silence.”
Emily continued to go to the forest because she felt there the “holiness” she had seen in Lawren Harris’s work; material objects – trees, undergrowth – held the spiritual. “Reverence the container,” she
