“If you called out, a thousand echoes would mock back.”
In works such as Strangled by Growth, that vague sense of being watched, and the sometime feeling of dread and fear that goes with it, became a part of her art. “You’ve got to have the ’creeps’,” Emily said, and though fear is not a dominant theme, the balance between terror and affirmation – joy, even – is a large part of the power in many of her paintings.
Several things gave her courage. One was that, even as a child, she had always felt more at home in the woods than in downtown streets. “I must be very animal and earthy,” she once wrote, “because I love the earth; it’s so dependable. I can’t trust machines.”
Her respect for the totem poles gave her courage, as did the fact that she now carried a small journal in her sketch sack. Writing her thoughts to Harris had so helped her to clarify them that she got into the habit of writing before she painted.
“Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting,” she said. Now, before she started a new piece of work, she asked her-self, “What attracted you to this particular subject? Why do you want to paint it? What is its core, the thing you are trying to express?” Then, in the fewest words possible, she wrote the answers in her little book. She found this method “very helpful.”
Emily’s courage was also no doubt bolstered by the creatures who accompanied her into the woods: dogs, birds, monkey, and often, when no one else could be persuaded to mind her, the white rat Susie, tucked inside a cut-down rolled oats carton. Animals, Emily said, “seemed somehow to bridge that gap between vegetable and human.”
In Victoria, she still felt lonely. She was fiercely jealous every time she heard about the eastern artists doing something together, but Harris insisted she was lucky to be so cut off. “Solitude is swell!” he cheered her. “Altogether too much chatter goes on.”
Emily wrote cheering notes to herself in her journal. “Hail your fellow travellers from a distance,” she advised herself. “Don’t try to catch up and keep step. Yell cheerio across the fields, but stick to your own particular path, be it paved or grassed, or just plain old dirt. It’s your path and suits your make of boots.”
Harris continued to write encouraging letters from Toronto. “Your peculiar contribution is unique,” he told her. “You can contribute something new and different in the art of this country.”
Sometimes she had to scold herself. “Hadn’t I always chosen solitude?” And yet, she mused, “I’d love an understanding companion,” and underlined “understanding.”
10
Success
Emily, don’t you know by now that you’re an oddment and a natural-born “solitaire’? There is no cluster or sunburst about you. You’re just a paste solitaire in a steel claw setting.
– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands
In 1930 Emily made her last trip to northern British Columbia. Not only was her art changing, but she was almost fifty-nine years old. It is a sign of her extraordinary commitment that she continued these rigorous trips for as long as she did.
By now, she was beginning to exhibit more widely. She had shown or would soon show her work in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery in Ottawa (in 1929 and 1930 as well as in 1927), in the Ontario Society of Artists exhibitions, and finally, after an eleven-year gap, at the Island Arts and Crafts Society in Victoria. There were inquiries from Edmonton, Calgary, and Toronto and from American galleries in Rochester and Buffalo. The only city in which it was certain her work would be unwelcome was Vancouver. Art criticism there was very conservative, and “modern” artists like Carr and the Group of Seven were still ridiculed or ignored.
Emily Carr with friends and pets (Woo on her shoulder), camping in “the Elephant.”
Summers in the Elephant were some of the happiest in her life.
After Emily paintings received a favourable response at the 1927 show at the National Gallery, even Victoria had begun to soften. Eric Brown and Marius Barbeau both praised her work whenever they were in Victoria, and the local press now boasted about her. But Emily was suspicious. She thought her fellow citizens were not so much impressed by her work, as by the fact that people in the East liked it, and this hurt her.
In 1930, when Emily went east again to attend her first solo exhibition in eastern Canada – at the Canadian National Railway’s ticket office in Ottawa – people in Ontario found her less shy and more confident. Everyone was enthusiastic about her work, including Lawren Harris, who talked to her again of how theosophy affected his life and strengthened his experience of nature. On this trip, Emily also overcame her dislike of large cities, which had not been kind to her in the past, and gathered her courage to visit the art galleries of New York. Briefly she met the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose paintings she found “beautiful.” She especially liked Lawrence Pine Tree, with Stars and the Jack-in-the-Pulpit series.
But in spite of these successes, the early 1930s were years of great struggle for her. In January 1931, Emily wrote, “My aims are changing and I feel lost and perplexed.”
Spiritually, it was a time of religious search that – eventually – brought her back to Christianity. The 1930s were a time of economic depression with thousands of people homeless and unemployed, unable to afford high rents or sometimes, rents of any kind. With such unsettled conditions, many were willing to explore radical political, economic, and spiritual alternatives, including various Pentecostal and nontraditional religions.
Emily changed from being one who avoided churches to one who attended regularly, although she didn’t go to churches of which her sisters would approve. The family’s church was Reformed Episcopalian, but for a time, Emily was drawn to the Victoria Unity Centre, which had grown up during the Depression as an alternative to the materialism of the Christian church. She regularly attended services and faith healings and even unsuccessfully petitioned the Centre to bring the famous Father Divine to Victoria.5
She explored various philosophies and attended the lectures of several different religious speakers, always trying to see the divine “manifest” in nature so she could express this in her painting. She asked her-self, “What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self, until the God quality in me is in tune with the God in it.”
She drove herself hard, never letting herself get smug or comfortable. In Victoria she wrote, “My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.” She wanted her things to “rock and sway with the breath and fluids of life” but worried that instead, “they sit, weak and still.” In 1933 when she got some paintings back from an exhibition and had a chance to take a fresh look at them, she despaired again.
