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Rachel Hung (洪敏秀)
July, 2010
Emily Carr (1871-1945)
A Brief Biography
Daughter of Emily Saunders and Richard Carr, Emily Carr was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, when the province joined Canada. After her parents' deaths in her early teens, Carr lived with her strict older sisters. She received her early education from private teachers and spent most of her young life on Vancouver Island. She began producing drawings and watercolors at an early age, but did not take formal art training until 1891, when Carr left Victoria to pursue the study of still life and landscapes at the California School of Design in San Francisco. She returned to British Columbia in 1893, where she taught children's art classes until she had saved enough money to study at the Westminster School of Art and privately with watercolorists in London. Accompanied by her sister, Carr remained in England from 1899 to 1904, learning the nineteenth-century British watercolor tradition. In 1910, she spent an extended period in France learning the Post-Impressionist style and Fauvist painting techniques of the modernist European art movement; when she returned, her documentary watercolors gave way to bolder, more emotive oil paintings. Carr returned to Canada in 1911 and became interested in the totems she saw on the West Coast of British Columbia, first in Ucluelet and, in 1912, on a six-week trip through the Skeena River region and Queen Charlotte Islands. Concerned with the way totemic art was being left to decay without any visual record, she sketched and painted Haida and Tlingit subjects, including houses, villages, and totem poles, resulting in an impressive body of work in color and oil.
Today, Emily Carr is best known as an early interpreter of North American Northwest Coast culture, through her painting and writing on British Columbia's First Nations. Carr was discovered during the late 1920s by central Canada's art establishment, which included Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery, and Lawren Harris of Canada's Group of Seven. The influence of her sojourn in France and involvement with Fauvism was evident during Carr's exhibitions in Toronto and Ottawa seventeen years after her period abroad, at the opening of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern. It was on this occasion, where her work was shown alongside that of the Group of Seven, that Carr gained real public recognition and a sense of belonging to an artistic movement. Subsequently, she was elevated to the status of national figure and her works received as important cultural artifacts.
Between 1899 and 1933, Carr visited about fifty Native villages from southern Vancouver Island up to Alaska. During a trip to Alaska in 1907, Carr encountered numerous villages and made her crucial commitment to document the vanishing Native culture: “The Indian people and their Art touched me deeply. . . . By the time I reached home my mind was made up. I was going to picture totem poles in their own village settings, as complete a collection of them as I could” (Growing Pains 257). For the next two summers, on breaks from teaching in Vancouver, Carr returned north to visit the villages. She continues: “The best material lay off the beaten track. To reach the villages was difficult and accommodation a serious problem. I slept in tents, roadmakers' toolsheds, in missions, and in Indian houses. I traveled in anything that floated in water or crawled over land” (Growing Pains 257). Carr would later describe her encounter with the indigenous art of the Canadian West Coast as a methodological and visual revelation.
Surrounded by “great woods and spaces,” Carr had experienced “a visual shock of the Indian art.” Her urgent concern became how to interpret the strangeness: “What about this New Art Paris talked of?” (Growing Pains 258). Carr's “struggle to pierce” was the characteristically terse but incisive work of this New Art, a wish to get beneath the surface to find stark images and deep structures. It resonated with Carr's attempt to free herself from an English way of seeing, to search for “a bigger, broader seeing.” The influence of her teacher Harry Gibb and the paintings of European Post-Impressionists showed Carr the liberty of color, line, and spatial relationships, elements adopted from Fauvist and Cubist sources that allowed her to rework Native subjects.
Carr had an exhibition in Victoria in 1913, and at the same time petitioned the British Columbia government to buy her paintings and drawings as a record of the culture she portrayed. That request was turned down, and Carr almost abandoned her art for the next fifteen years. The next turning point in her career came in 1927, when the National Gallery of Canada organized an exhibit of Native and Modern West Coast Art; Carr's work, still unknown outside British Columbia, was made the focus of the exhibition. Well-known ethnologist Marius Barbeau and Eric Brown then learned of Carr; her work had the largest representation of villages from every cultural group on the Northwest Coast. When she travelled to Ottawa for the exhibition opening, Carr met several Group of Seven painters, including Lawren Harris, whose work had an immediate and significant influence on her own. Carr then returned to Victoria to rework some earlier pieces, painting from photographs she had taken while making long sketching trips through the woods. With Carr's renewed view of art, West Coast forests and other natural subjects began to replace Native themes in her work. After 1927, Carr's work received more critical attention.
In 1926, Carr took a creative writing course, and in 1927 she began keeping a journal in which she recorded ideas for artwork. After 1937, when Carr was often confined to bed as a result of several strokes and heart attacks, she turned seriously to writing. By 1940, her stories were read on CBC radio, and, with Ira Dilworth's encouragement and assistance, she completed her first book, Klee Wyck (1941). The title means “laughing one,” a name given to Carr by the Nuu-chah-nulth people. This collection of short stories, which won a Governor General's Award for non-fiction, was based on her visits to Native villages in British Columbia. In 1942, she published The Book of Small, an autobiography describing her family life in late nineteenth-century Victoria from Carr's point of view as a child with the nickname Small.
Published two years later, The House of All Sorts (1944) humorously narrates the period in which Carr raised bobtail sheepdogs as a boarding-house landlady. She died shortly after its publication. Another autobiography, Growing Pains, written between 1939 and 1944, was, by her request, published posthumously in 1946. This account records mainly her sojourn of art study in San Francisco and London. According to Misao Dean, Growing Pains recounts the process by which Native art taught Carr to simplify form in her paintings and transform representation to express meaning. Carr adopted a similar aesthetic in her writing, aiming her style at the “ruin of representation” and thus distorting the facts of her life; this made her writing controversial. From Klee Wyck to Growing Pains, Carr would not always faithfully portray fact, but created a sense of victimization for her protagonists.
Most of Carr's written work was published posthumously. Recounting the people and events of the East Anglia Sanatorium in Suffolk, England, from 1903 to 1904, Carr supplemented her humorous and poignant reminiscences with drawings and doggerel verse in Pause: A Sketch Book, which was completed thirty years later and published in 1953. The Heart of a Peacock (1953), edited by Ira Dilworth, whom she had made her literary trustee, is a collection of stories and prose sketches. Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (1966) comprises selections from Carr's journals, composed between 1927 and 1941, recording her joys, challenges, disappointments, and experiments to express the world around her. With a personal tone and vivid descriptions, these journals reveal the touching honesty of her work.
General Reviews
Carr turned to two things for inspiration in her painting: what her biographer Doris Shadbolt calls the “material presence of the aboriginal culture of the past” (totem poles, masks, and ruins of houses) and the distinctive local West Coast landscape (trees, brush, water, and skies). Carr's paintings are examples of colorful and dramatic expressionism. Her striking use of heavy greens, blues, and greys with bold brush strokes creates landscapes that surge with motion and intensity. Her art captures the sublime power of the rain forests and islands of the North American West Coast. . . .
(Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Vol. II., 35-36)
In general, Carr's writings are poor sources for the facts of her life. Autobiographical writing is always in some sense a fictional project: the creation of a “self” who, by following in a predetermined narrative pattern, provides clear motives and justification for events that otherwise might seem random, self-contradictory, or unintelligible. In Growing Pains the “meaning” that emerges from the distortion is the “struggle story” of an artist's growth from uncertainty and obscurity to acceptance; in the books of sketches an imaginative and vulnerable protagonist is nurtured by the natural world and victimized by the human, “civilized” one. As in her paintings, the overall patterns take precedence over any mere factual details; these have been left to the scholars to debate. . . .
(Misao Dean, Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada 183)
Further Reading
Blanchard, Paula. The Life of Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987.
Dodd, Kerry Mason. Sunlight in the Shadows: The Landscape of Emily Carr. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1984.
Hill, Charles C., Johanne Lamoureux, and Ian M. Thom, eds. Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006.
Moray, Gerta. Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2006.
Shadbolt, Doris. Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1989.
---, ed. The Complete Writings of Emily Carr. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993.
Tippett, Maria. Emily Carr: A Biography. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1979.
Vancouver Art Gallery Emily Carr Website: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/EmilyCarr/
Works Consulted
Dean, Misao. “Carr, Emily.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. William H. New. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 181-83.
Mason, Kerry. “Carr, Emily.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 177-78.
“Emily Carr.” Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars. Vol. II. Toronto: Pearson, 2009. 35-36.
“Emily Carr” A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Donna Bennett and Russell Brown. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2002. 237-38.
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