To Miss Carr, with thanks.

Miss Emily Carr.
Born December 13, 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia.

What an interesting, unexpected woman she was.
She traveled to San Francisco, Paris and London during the turn of the century, painting and learning as she went.

Upon her return to Victoria in 1913, she found herself very poor and in need of an income that her art work just didn't supply. She lived in a world that frequently shunned artists and were even less likely to be interested in women artists that had a dozen dogs and a monkey named 'Woo' that she would carriage around on the old streets.

She eventually found some relief while travelling and painting around British Columbia (in between chasing after her tenants whom it seemed she generally disliked).
She painted and camped through "Gold Stream Park" just outside of Victoria in her old caravan, all the way to remote First Nations villages of the Queen Charlotte Island (or Haida Gwaii).
Generally, she would be ferried out to those hidden ghost-villages and left with her camping gear and crumbling totem poles; determined to seek her god alone.

Eventually, Canada's other major contributors to the world of art, the Group of Seven, met with Miss Carr; to all of their delights they found kindred spirits in each.
She and Lawren Harris corresponded till death.

"Scorned as Timber.
Beloved of the Sky" 1935

I honestly didn't like her works all that much.
I found them generally to stark.
To abstract for my palate.
I recognized her as an important figure in not only art history, but the history of Canada and the history of women.
I just didn't really feel that I needed to love her art.

After several heart attacks, Emily found it more and more difficult to travel and paint (both of which were her passions), so she turned to words.
It was if, despite her ailing, she could not cease to create...to give room for that force bursting for release.
And that's how I finally 'met' Miss Carr...through her art of words.

From her journals, "Hundreds and Thousands".

"...What most attracts me in those wild, lawless, deep, solitary places? First, nobody goes there. Why? Few have anything to go for. The loneliness repels them, the density, the unsafe hidden footing, the dank smells, the great quiet, the mystery, the general mix-up (tangle, growth, what may be hidden there), the insect life. They are repelled by the awful solemnity of the age-old trees, with the wisdom of all their years of growth looking down upon you, making you feel perfectly infinitesimal--their overpowering weight, their groanings and creakings, mutterings and sighings--the rot and decay of the old ones--the toadstools and slugs among the upturned, rotting roots of those that have fallen, reminding one of the perishableness of even those slow-maturing, much enduring growths.
No, to the average woman and to the average man, (unless he goes there to kill, to hunt or to destory the forest for utility) the forest jungle is a closed book. In the abstract people may say they love it but they do not prove it by entering it and breathing its life. They stay outside and talk about its beauty. This is bad for them but it is good for the few who do enter because the holiness and quiet is unbroken."


"Forest" 1932 "Big Raven" 1931




And then I understood what she was painting. The book I read of hers astounded me. I didn't actually need to see her paintings and sketches, she was describing her yearning energy and deep rooted passion of her world with words instead of paint.

I can 'SEE' her art now...at last it says something to me.
The strokes of bright living green turning upwards to the swirling blue of the sky.
The heavy musty gray of old totems, thick with moss and decay.

At last.

Now I can truly appreciate Emily Carr.

She has given something to all of us in her passion for the dark and green and wild places of British Columbia.

If there was anyone that could make me feel so happy to live in the wet, dripping rain forest of fecundity, it is her.

P.S.
I should mention that the last picture is of a statue of Miss Carr recently placed in Vancouver. It includes her monkey ('Woo'), her horse and one of her loved dogs.
For you Vancouver area folk, it's at the corner of Granville and 7th (or is it 6th? One of them, anyway!)