Our Emily: Locating Ourselves in a National Icon
"Our Emily: Locating Ourselves in a National Icon" by Robin Laurence, Spring 2005, pp. 64–68
I've been composing letters to Emily Carr, sending them off into the ether through the cornball courier of the mind. "Dear Millie," I write. "Are you aware of how high your star has risen since you died?" I ask her if she knows how much her paintings now command at auction. How popular her books are, how well attended the exhibitions of her art. I inquire whether she's noticed the dozens upon dozens of works, across many media and disciplines, predicated on her art and her life. And I wonder about the many ways in which we now seek to honour her, to worship at her shrine and, like acolytes, to define ourselves by her.
Since her death in 1945, but at increasingly accelerated rates over the last three decades, dozens of novels, plays, children's books, films, videos, TV docudramas, dance productions, musicals, artworks and records have been produced on the subject and theme of Emily Carr. There have been biographies, monographs, dissertations, critical analyses, exhibitions and exhibition catalogues, too—constructions and deconstructions of Emily Carr by curators, historians, art historians and archivists. Notable among them are Paula Blanchard, Gerta Moray, Maria Tippett, Sharyn Udall, Marcia Crosby, Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, Katherine Bridge, Ian Thom and Susan Crean. Crean's book, The Laughing One/A Journey to Emily Carr, published in 2001, combines fact, fiction, critical analysis and personal essay to search out Carr's various personae, to examine her relationship to her subject matter and to explore the reasons we are so compelled by her. It's a beautifully reasoned and widely researched reading of Emily Carr's art, life and myth.
An enormous debt is owed to the late Doris Shadbolt, who was essential in elevating Carr's standing from regional crank to national icon. Not that she herself proposed Carr as an icon (our clamouring need for gods, heroes and celebrities did that), but she was responsible for advancing a critical-curatorial approach to Carr's paintings and for opening our eyes to her enormous and hardwon accomplishments as an artist. Shadbolt curated the first comprehensive retrospective of Carr's work (at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1971), curated another important Carr exhibition for the National Gallery in 1990, wrote two watershed books about her art in the context of her life and times and composed a third book of scholarship dedicated to her sketchbooks.
Shadbolt wrote about Carr's determined sense of otherness and wilful individuality, and showed us how her self-perception as rebel and solitary outsider served her striving to find a new form of art—a form that interwove early modernism, individual expression and nationalistic declaration. Shadbolt described for us Carr's long journey of "becoming," the years of learning and struggle as her art evolved from the academic realism she studied in San Francisco and London in her teens and twenties through the bright, bold post-Impressionism she encountered in France in her early forties to the sculptural and cubistic approach to form she acquired through her contact with Lawren Harris (and others) when she was in her late fifties. Together with her evolved subject matter—totem pole and rainforest—it's this mature style by which Carr is best known. Still, her work did not climax there: in her last decade, Carr's paintings opened up, abandoning the dark and engulfing forest, embracing wide, pulsing skies, radiant open spaces and an ecstatic's view of universal energy and mystical light, part Vincent van Gogh, part Hildegard von Bingen. Again, it is possible to see the way Carr's story—her long journey, her painful striving, her eventual arrival at a place of joyful transcendence—speaks to us both through and beyond her art. As her style evolved, so did her life unfold its lonely struggle. And it is struggle, not ease and facility, with which we most identify.
Shadbolt's intelligent eye, wise mind and resonant prose also cued us to Carr's evolved vision, her attachment to First Nations culture and the West Coast landscape and her pantheistic sense of God immanent in every leaf, branch and blade of grass. Cued us, in her 1990 book Emily Carr, to Carr's view of nature as a "continuing process of creation, an oceanic world of continuous ebb and change." Shadbolt goes on to describe the "enormous pervasive sexual energy of her painting as openings and enclosures vibrate with light and movement." Many of Carr's landscapes express fecundity and the cyclical nature of life, but there could hardly be a more sexualized image of the forest than her 1929–30 Tree Trunk, in which a smooth, glimmering trunk thrusts upward into the dark, labial folds of foliage. In her own journals, published as Hundreds and Thousands, Carr directed herself to "go into the woods alone and look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots...each seed according to its own kind expanding, bursting, pushing its way upward towards the light and air...Feel this growth, the surging upward, this expansion, the pulsing life, all working with the same idea, the same urge to express the God in themselves."
Carr's attitude towards human sexuality and the body was painfully conflicted. As a young student at the California School of Design in San Francisco, she refused to draw from the nude, so inhibited was she by her strict, prudish, Protestant upbringing, having been taught that the naked body was "indecent," as she wrote in her autobiography, Growing Pains, something to be ashamed of. Later, at the Westminster School of Art in London, she became a convert to life drawing, awakened by the ideas of her fellow students to the beauty of the naked body. (The naked female body. Her feelings about the naked male body remain unspoken, although perhaps not unexpressed.) There were the puritanical Victorian dictates of family, church and society, her apparently lifelong horror at the crudeness with which her father told her the facts of life and her refusal of marriage. The latter can be seen as Carr's recognition that, in her time and place, she could not be an artist if she was also a wife and a mother, but can be read, too, as Paula Blanchard suggests, as a refusal of adult sexuality, stranding her in eternal, innocent childhood, defiant yet chaste. All these facts are pitched against the evidence, in her own writing and the accounts of others, of her passionate nature, her extraordinary aliveness to the sensory pleasures of the world, especially the sights, sounds, textures and smells of her natural environment. And the irrefutable evidence of her paintings.
Carr's sexuality has intrigued and troubled a number of biographers, artists and writers, most recent among them Margaret Hollingsworth in Be Quiet and Susan Vreeland in The Forest Lover. Hollingsworth, in a novel that jumps back and forth between the historical and the contemporary, depicts Carr as rude, prickly, anti-social, yet longing for friendship, approval, inclusion—not so different from the personality revealed in Carr's own writing. Hollingsworth also imagines that Carr was subject to some very unorthodox treatment—electro-convulsive and genital stimulation—when she was a patient in a Suffolk sanitorium, suffering from a mysterious, incapacitating illness, perhaps hysteria, that 19th-century male invention, the supposed malady of the sexually frustrated female. Carr is more sympathetically drawn in Vreeland's novel: she's an eccentric outsider, yes, but her character is tempered with courage, humour, generosity and self-doubt. Vreeland creates a fictional romance for Carr, crediting her with powerful sexual feelings for a man who, wholly unbelievably, respects her chastity because of her dedication to her art. Hmmm.
There's long been concern that Richard Carr's lesson in the facts of life—"the brutal telling," as Emily Carr later described it—might have involved more than words, a concern that accords with ideas of sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder, now familiar tropes of both psychotherapy and contemporary literature. Again, how to reconcile Carr's paintings with the facts of her solitary spinsterhood. Could works this explicit be archetypal accidents? Could they be manifestations of early modernist sensibility? Certainly, Carr's sexualized landscapes, her conflating of earthly fertility, divine creation and personal expression, accord with the poetry of Walt Whitman, which she read devotedly. Although we consider ourselves postmodernists, cynical about modernist and colonial attitudes towards the land and, at the same time, depressed about our devastating impact on it, we still cling to the idea of nature as a realm in which we can find physical and spiritual renewal. Carr's paintings powerfully reinforce such feelings.
Lately, I reread Carr's autobiography, Growing Pains, for which I'd been invited to prepare an introduction. The publisher Douglas & McIntyre is reprinting Carr's books—the ones she wrote late in her career, the ones that brought her far more public acclaim than her paintings did in her lifetime. Ironic—although in Growing Pains, Carr seems quite pleased with the fuss made over her writing (including a Governor General's award for Klee Wyck), late-arriving and oddly deflected from the main event though it was. One of my editors has remarked that, in the realm of literary autobiography, Carr is singular among Canadian visual artists. In recent years, Joe Plaskett and Mary Pratt have written memoirs, and Toni Onley told his life story to the writer Gregory Strong, who transcribed it to the page. Yet through the number of her published books, her punchy and original writing style and her determination to frame her life into stories that vibrate with the energy and conviction of her paintings, Carr remains a distinctive presence at the intersection of Canadian art and literature. Her voice is forthright, vivid, imaginative. It's also, at times, angry and indignant.
There's a significant scene in Growing Pains in which Carr kicks a clerk in a high-end London shoe shop, knocking him over. One of her feet, whose big toe has recently been amputated after a long-untreated fracture and dislocation, is acutely painful. The clerk ignores her requests that she put her shoe on and off herself and Carr, seated in front of him, boots him in the chest. At first, this looks like an act of extreme rudeness and immaturity, like the petulant, uncontrolled anger of a five-year-old. On second reading, that kick takes on a symbolic cast. The snooty clerk—officious, English, male—literally refuses to hear Carr's voice, disallows her many months of pain, suffering and incapacity and attempts to assume control of an aspect of her being. The scene, which mortifies her genteel companion, becomes a paradigm for Carr's struggle against colonialism, convention and patriarchy. That struggle, again, is manifested in her paintings: as her sense of herself evolves, so does her art, from her sexually charged but in many ways dark and oppressive rainforest scenes to the late, light-filled, ecstatic landscapes, in which gender, sexuality and social isolation are thrown off in a mystical sense of oneness with the cosmos.
Last fall, my musings about Carr were inflected by the much-publicized discovery of an early portrait on the back of one of her landscapes, executed between 1913 and 1920. Speculation was launched that the portrait, probably completed between 1890 and 1893, when she was an art student in San Francisco, was of Carr herself. A self-portrait of a young and pretty Emily Carr, hands folded in prayer, looking devoutly upward—what excitement! What nonsense. I've been wanting to talk with her about that, too, send her an exasperated message. "Don't they know you had a square jaw, curly hair and tilted grey eyes, and the young woman you painted has a long, dew-drop chin, straight hair and round brown eyes?" But never mind likeness, always a dodgy issue in portraiture and more so for Carr, who, in an unsubtle reflection of her sympathies, was much better at rendering trees than people. Not only is there no physical resemblance between Carr and the model, there's no metaphysical alignment, either. Throughout Carr's autobiographical writing, she skewers anybody she suspects of false or excessive piety. She deplores the stifling religiosity of her father and her older sisters, finds it inhibiting and untrue to her own understanding of the divine. In 1893, when Carr returned to Victoria from San Francisco, she was appalled by all the prayer meetings that were taking place in her family home, which had become a meeting place for visiting missionaries and the Victoria chapter of the YWCA. She records charging into rooms and tripping over kneeling figures in prayerful attitudes, earning the ire of her sanctimonious sisters.
Perhaps the self-portrait speculators had looked at early photographs of Emily Carr, had read, too, the relevant passages in Growing Pains, and knew full well that Carr would never depict herself in such an insipid and sentimental way. Still, interest was successfully aroused. On November 25, 2004, the work sold at auction in Toronto for $373,750, more than twice the upper end of its pre-sale estimate. Yes, the Canadian art market has been heating up, but since neither the post-Impressionist landscape on the flip side—an arbutus tree, probably painted on Dallas Road in Victoria, looking out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca—nor the conservative Victorian portrait is particularly good, some of what occurred must be attributable to the marriage of consumerism and the cult of personality. The celebrity that attached itself to Emily Carr has worked its way inexorably into the marketplace.
As with all our celebrities, living and dead, Emily Carr serves as a vehicle for our own longings and aspirations. Upon her notions of individual expression and national landscape we project ours—and vice versa. We see the British Columbia wilderness in her terms, but we see her themes and her suffering in ours. In her introduction to The Emily Carr Omnibus, published in 1993, Doris Shadbolt points out that Carr "has been drawn into the intense critical discussions which are part of our present-day socio-cultural climate." These, she writes, include feminism, First Nations issues and environmental concerns. Whatever the biases of our age, whatever the appropriative nature of hers, Emily Carr created passionate images of rainforest and totem poles with which we as passionately identify. We look at her paintings and see primordial land, original peoples and Emily. Our Emily.
Spring 2005
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
