THE ART OF EMILY CARR

Born in 1871, Emily Carr grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, surrounded by a rugged landscape that fostered her passion for nature, animals, and painting. Carr started taking drawing lessons at the age of nine and decided to become an artist in her early teens. Before she was sixteen, both of her parents had died, so she lived with her sister until she went to art school in San Francisco. Later she studied in England and France before returning to Canada. Carr’s early paintings were well received by local critics in Victoria and Vancouver, yet it was difficult to make a living from painting alone, so she supported herself by teaching children’s art classes, raising dogs, and operating a boarding house.

Early in life, Carr developed an interest in painting the aboriginalculture of British Columbia. At the age of twenty-six, she made her first sketching trip to Ucluelet, an Indian Reserve on the west side of Vancouver Island. Her paintings of the First Nations people documented their fishing villages, totem poles, and life in the forest. Her fondness for aboriginal culture can be seen in Totem Forest, a series of totem poles painted in a bold style as Carr attempted to capture the spirit of the scene that would transcend its physical reality. The people of the villages affectionately called her “Klee Wyck,” which means “the laughing one.”

For the next forty years, Carr returned to the aboriginal villages to sketch and paint. These camping trips were unusual for a woman of her time, but to paint successfully Carr had to wrestle with the elements, with all of her senses alert. She drew inspiration from the cold, raw dampness of the coast, the sounds of the forest, and the sting of the smoke from campfires—experiences that she distilled to their essence in her large body of work.

Carr began to receive national recognition in 1927. At her first major exhibition outside of British Columbia, her paintings were shown in Toronto along with those of the Group of Seven. Carr met some of the Group when she traveled east for the show, and she liked what she saw of their work, especially the paintings of Lawren Harris. She eventually became a close friend of Harris and other prominent Canadian artists who treated her as a kindred spirit. The Toronto exhibition was a turning point for Carr, establishing her reputation as a leading figure in Canadian art. Encouraged by Harris, Carr revisited her earlier themes, creating the monumental paintings of totem poles that are her best-known works. She combined modernism with aboriginal form and color to create a powerful and unique visual landscape that captured the transcendental qualities of the wilderness.

At the age of seventy, Carr realized that the ancient First Nations culture might one day be lost, so she began to write stories about the beautiful, calm places of her earlier life among her aboriginal friends. As she lay in her bed, disabled by failing health, she recounted her days as Klee Wyck, which after forty years were still fresh in her mind because she had lived them so deeply at the time. In 1941 Carr published these stories in her first book, Klee Wyck, which united art and literature in a highly original way and won the Governor-General’s award for general literature.

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