At the start of 1937, Emily Carr was sixty-five, and about to confirm her international recognition with representation in group exhibitions in London’s Tate Gallery the following year, and at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Painting from her caravan, The Elephant, she was continuing to innovate in her views of the landscape around Victoria, British Columbia.

Carr described Above the Gravel Pit (1937) as “a skyscape with roots and gravel pits”, that she wanted to be “free and jubilant, not crucified into one spot, static.” Her paintings in these final years of her career show the ultimate development of her brushstrokes into the unifying framework. Vibrant blue waves of the sky contrast with the greens and browns of the earth below. But Carr links the sky and trees with both hints of colour and echoing patterns made by her brush: these extend into the shallow chalk scarp and the two tree-stumps in the right foreground.

Then she suffered her first heart attack; The Elephant was too much effort for her, and she had to rent summer houses and cabins to continue her painting. She turned more to writing, and in 1941 won a literary award for her first book, Klee Wyck, a collection of short stories about her travels in the Pacific North-West.

In her Dancing Sunlight (1937-40), vortexes of brushstrokes have replaced all solid form. Trees, light, foliage, even the sky have been swept into those strokes sweeping across the canvas like a whirlwind. She had earlier been absorbed by abstract art, but had continued to represent real objects using techniques which restructured them, rather than abstracting.

Somberness Sunlit (1937-40) shows a similar approach, in this case with the sunlight that has penetrated through the canopy, dissolving the form of the tree trunks.

Over this period, Carr had a growing concern with the deforestation occurring on the West Coast, which paralleled the earlier encroachments and destruction by Europeans of First Nations cultures. Themes that she had previously expressed in paintings such as Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1931) were now rephrased using patterned and unifying brushstrokes, in paintings such as this untitled work from 1938-39.

Odds and Ends (1939) is another of her most important paintings, not just from this period, but from her whole career. It shows the young and very high trees left behind as being of no commercial value after felling. Carr described the low stubs left on the stumps as being the trees’ tombstones.

In 1939, she suffered her second heart attack, further curtailing physical activity.

In Plumed Firs (1939-41), Carr revisits a similar motif, following felling, with greater unification of her brushstrokes and marks between sky, forest, and the bare land left afterwards.

She suffered her first stroke in 1940, and a second in 1944. Although she continued to paint in her final years her pace was drastically reduced, and she concentrated her efforts on writing.

In 1941-42, Carr painted a small series based on her earlier sketches and paintings among the First Nations peoples in around 1912. A Skidegate Beaver Pole (1941-42) is one of those, developed from a group of sketches made in the Haida village of Skidegate in 1912. Its totem is painted more confidently earlier; those old sketches and paintings now looked tentative in their careful accuracy. Here the surrounding vegetation, forest and sky are all expressed in swirling brushstrokes.

In August 1942, she travelled to Mount Douglas Park, near Victoria, for her last painting trip. She had been organising works to be given in trust for the citizens of British Columbia, which now form the core of the Emily Carr Trust collection. She died in 1945.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

After more than a decade of neglect, Emily Carr’s art had finally achieved the recognition that it deserved during the late 1920s, and by 1930 her career was transformed. She was a national if not international success.

Big Raven (1931) is one of Carr’s major works, and evolved from her original watercolour showing this massive totem at Cumshewa in 1912, through The Raven (1928-29), included in the previous article. Vegetation around the totem has transformed into viscous waves, swirling around the hillside and the base of the totem. The raven itself is a smooth, preternatural sculpted object. Even the sky now resembles the inside of a huge theatre, with sheets of light around. The whole painting has a monumental appearance, an elegiac gravity typical of her new approach to First Nations motifs.

Zunoqua of the Cat Village (1931) shows a totem of particular interest to Carr, representing the female ogre Dzunukwa or Zunoqua. She is the ‘wild woman of the woods’, a thief of children but capable of bringing wealth to the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples. Carr wrote that she found these figures terrifying in their expression of power and domination. Scattered among the swirling vegetation are many cats, which look equally menacing.

As Carr returned to visit villages in the Haida Gwaii that she had last seen in about 1912, she noticed the changes that had taken place: suppression of the potlatch system, and clear-cutting of the forest. This comes through in these later paintings of First Nations cultures, as mourning for the disappearing people, a pervasive grief for what was rapidly being lost.

Lawren Harris had advised Emily Carr to concentrate on “the tremendous elusive what lies behind” those First Nations villages, and during the 1930s she shifted her attention more to the forest and landscape. Forest, British Columbia (1931-32) is one of her finest paintings of a theme she had been developing since Totem Walk at Sitka (1907) and Wood Interior (1909), shown earlier in this series.

Its broken processional composition consists of a series of theatrical planes, behind which columns of tree-trunks recede into the depths. These are illuminated from within. Carr had been influenced by abstract art, although she didn’t intend to paint abstracts herself, producing many finished charcoal drawings of the interiors of forests as she worked her ideas up for these paintings.

Old Tree at Dusk (c 1932) uses similar sculptural language in a more open setting, with the heightened drama of night. Her brushwork is also starting to build structure into the bark of the trees.

Blue Sky (1932-34) is another major work, showing a clearing with an elevated canopy formed by high trees. Her brushwork in the sky continues to become more structured, forming a high arch to echo that in the trees and resemble the interior of a cathedral.

In 1933, she bought a caravan which she named The Elephant, and had towed to different landscapes around Victoria to enable her to paint there. Two years later, Carr held her first solo exhibition in eastern Canada, hosted in Toronto by the Women’s Art Association of Canada.

During the mid 1930s, Carr painted some wonderful coastal views, including her watercolour Seascape (c 1935). I suspect this is a view not too far from Victoria, where she lived. Unusually for watercolour, she appears to have used colour almost straight from the tube, and structured both land and sea with her brushstrokes.

Her Young Pines and Sky (c 1935) shows less sculptural form, and greater reliance on brushwork, both in forming the slender trees and in the arched cloud and sky.

She took the theme of exceptionally tall trees to its extreme in her Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1936). Using a point of view close to the ground, in the middle of a cleared area, three isolated trees reach right up into the sky, where her patterned brushstrokes shimmer in the light.

Carr uses rich colours and intensely patterned brushwork in her dramatic Strait of Juan de Fuca (c 1936). This runs between Vancouver Island to the north, and the Olympic Peninsula, and her view captures the majesty of its scenery, sea and sky. The patterning of Carr’s brushstrokes and the sweep of the land to the left is echoed in an upward sweep apparent in the sea at the right. This suggests that she may have been envisioning the landscape through the optical distortion of a very wide-angle or fish-eye lens.

In the distance, on the opposite side of the strait, are the blue Olympic Mountains, contrasting with the rich green of the near shore at the left, and the orange-red of the sun.

Emily Carr was now 65, and finally established among the leading North American artists of the day. As the world headed inexorably towards war, her paintings were about to travel to Europe at last.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

The 1913 solo exhibition of two hundred of Emily Carr’s paintings of totems and villages of the First Nations in the Pacific North-West flopped. Despite trying to enlist the support of the minister of education in British Columbia, her art had been rejected, and was even refused by the new provincial museum. She returned to Victoria, opened a boarding house on Simcoe Street, and seldom painted. But she didn’t stop painting altogether, and by the late 1920s had started travelling to First Nations villages again to study and paint their culture.

She continued to paint in Fauvist style over this time, as seen in her Logging Camp (c 1920).

This painting of an Arbutus Tree (1922) is a fascinating contrast with her previous watercolour of the same species from about 1909. This tree is painted much more loosely and in vibrant high chroma.

In 1924, Emily Carr met with Seattle artists, most importantly Mark Tobey, who helped rebuild her confidence in her art.

Her Self-portrait from 1924-25 shows her still suffering from rejection, though. Most unusually for a self-portrait, she faces away from the viewer, and is working on a painting that is unrecognisably vague and formless.

A visit by Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada, made 1927 the turning point in Carr’s art. She was invited to join the Group of Seven for a major exhibition in Ottawa, and twenty-six of her oil paintings, together with pottery and hooked rugs made when running the boarding house, were shown there. She became particularly close to Lawren Harris (1885-1970), who became her mentor.

In the summer of 1928, Carr made her first major trip north since 1913, to the Nass and Skeena Rivers and Haida Gwaii. Among the more significant paintings which resulted is this superb watercolour of a totem presumably at Ankeda (1928).

Kitwancool (1928) shows a forest of poles at a village now known as Gitanyow, populated by the Gitxsan. This is near the Kitwanga River, a tributary of the Skeena, in north-west British Columbia. This village is now a National Historic Site.

Carr’s watercolour of a Queen Charlotte Islands Totem (1928) shows another site in what’s now known as Haida Gwaii, which she had visited extensively during her earlier campaigns prior to 1913.

The Raven (1928-19) is a precursor of one of Carr’s best-known paintings, Big Raven (1931), and shares with it a motif based on a huge carved raven silhouetted against the sky, and the sculptural forms of trees. These were derived from an early watercolour painted at Cumshewa in 1912, showing this massive totem. It heralds her new emphasis on the modelling of forms, influenced by Lawren Harris in particular.

Blunden Harbour (c 1930) shows Carr’s evolving style well. This village, inhabited by ‘Nak’waxda’xw (Nakoaktok) of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, was on the coast of the British Columbian mainland opposite Haida Gwaii, seen to the right, at the mouth of the Queen Charlotte Strait. As an isolated community, its population was forced to relocate to Port Hardy, about sixteen miles away, in 1964. Before the last of its inhabitants had even left in their boats, officials set fire to the village and burnt it to the ground, ensuring that no one would try to return.

The source of Carr’s motif remains uncertain; it has been claimed that she painted this from a photograph of the village taken in 1901 by the ethnographer Charles F Newcombe. However, the great majority of Carr’s paintings of the north-west appear to have been painted from life, rather than using old photographs taken by others.

Path among Pines (c 1930) is another sign of the changes taking place in Carr’s art at this time. Its trees are solid forms, with swirling hues over their surfaces. The path swoops up into the distance in a carved curve. Totems would remain important in Carr’s art, but she was now also taking to the forest.

By 1930, her career had been transformed. She was a national if not international success, and travelled to New York, where she met Georgia O’Keeffe among others, and exhibited with the Group of Seven that year.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

In 1912, when Emily Carr returned to Vancouver from Paris, she established herself there as a Fauvist when exhibiting her work from France in her studio. Equipped with what she had learned over the last 22 years in California, Canada, and Europe, she then set out on her project to document the peoples of the First Nations of the north-west coast.

In the summer of 1912, she travelled north to Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte Islands), the Upper Skeena River, and Moresby Island. She there documented the totems and buildings of the Haida, Gitxsan, and Tsimshian peoples. Following that, she returned to Vancouver to teach and work, then returned north when she could afford to.

Cumshewa (1912) is a watercolour showing totems and part of the Haida settlement of Cumshewa, in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia. It had been a centre of the maritime fur trade until the early nineteenth century, and was named in commemoration of an important Haida chief during that period of trade. Carr remarked on its incessantly damp climate.

Potlatch Figure (Mimquimlees) (1912) shows a figure who had been involved in gift-giving practices that had been banned by the Canadian government, until they were eventually decriminalised after the Second World War.

Potlatches were held as rites of passage, on the occasion of births, deaths, weddings, etc., and typically more often during winter. A feast was hosted by the rich, and attended by their kin group. This was accompanied by the exchange of gifts, in the distribution and sometimes destruction of property that was an important part of the dynamic, and the features that concerned government.

Skedans Poles, Queen Charlotte Islands (1912) is a watercolour showing a remarkable array of totems at this Haida village in Haida Gwaii. It’s now part of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, and a National Historic Site of Canada in its own right.

Skidegate (1912) shows a single totem in another Haida community in Haida Gwaii.

Tanoo (1912) is a watercolour of two totems at another Haida site in the Haida Gwaii archipelago, near Cumshewa.

Carr’s watercolour of Tsatsisnukomi, B.C. (1912) was probably painted on the British Columbia mainland near Johnstone Strait, to the north of Vancouver Island, in which case it shows totems of the Tlowitsis Nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples.

First Nations War Canoes in Alert Bay, 1912 (1912) shows three large canoes in this Kwakwaka’wakw village on Cormorant Island, which is just off the north coast of Vancouver Island. Unusually for Carr’s paintings, it includes a small group of figures talking together under the prominent tree behind the canoes. As far as I can tell, this is a finished oil version derived from a watercolour painting that is considerably less Fauvist.

Yan, Q.C.I. (1912) must be one of Carr’s finest paintings of this campaign in the north of British Columbia. It shows an arc composed of numerous totems in this bay in Haida Gwaii, during the summer when the flowers are in full bloom. The colours are vibrant but not garish or dazzling, and her brushwork develops a rich range of textures.

Indian House Interior with Totems (1913) is another superb painting, showing the interior of a large house with its brightly painted totems, complete with a kin group, pets, and possessions.

She also painted some views of the south, including this strongly Fauvist Vancouver Street (1912-13), a marked contrast from her more rigorously documentary depictions of totems and villages in the north.

In 1913, Carr organised an exhibition of two hundred of her paintings from her travels to the north, the largest solo exhibition mounted by an artist in Vancouver at that time. Reaction to her paintings and a lecture she gave on them was mixed: when she offered her paintings to the new provincial museum, they were refused, and the minister of education failed to offer any support.

Carr decided to return to Victoria, where some of her sisters still lived. For the next thirteen years, she concentrated her attention on running a boarding house on Simcoe Street, and seldom painted.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Thom, Ian M (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter, more than anyone else, has defined its ‘look’. She’s also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient good images to justify a short series of articles: she is Emily Carr (1871–1945), one of the major painters of North America.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, to parents who had emigrated from England. Their large family was quite affluent thanks to her father’s business dealings, but her mother died of tuberculosis when Emily was only fourteen, and her father died two years later. Thanks to her guardian, Carr started studies at the California School of Design in San Francisco in 1890, but in 1893, when family finances became tight, she had to return home.

Her still life of Melons dates from those years as a student in California, in 1892.

Back in Victoria, she started teaching art in her studio, enabling her to save up enough money to study abroad again.

In 1898, she travelled to Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where she stayed among the Nuu-chah-nulth (‘Nootka’) people, her first exposure to First Nations culture. Cedar Cannibal House, Ucluelet, BC (1898) is a watercolour made during that visit. This group of tribes had early contact with European settlers; they had suffered badly from epidemics of infectious disease, and at the time that Carr visited, their population had probably fallen to around 3,500.

The following year, Carr travelled to London, where she studied at the Westminster School of Art. She found the teaching there was too conservative, and didn’t cope well with conditions in the sprawling city, so left there in 1901 to visit Paris, and later the Saint Ives art colony in Cornwall. She stayed there through the winter, being taught in the Porthmeor Studios by Julius Olsson (1864-1942) and his assistant. She later studied further in Hertfordshire under John Whiteley.

Carr then became unwell, and in 1903 entered the East Anglian Sanatorium with a diagnosis of hysteria. She was unable to paint there, and managed to return to Canada in 1904. She resumed teaching, this time in Vancouver. However, she didn’t get on well with society women who attended her classes, and they complained of her behaviour of smoking and swearing at them in class.

Carr’s Breton Church (1906) is a puzzle, as she was back in Canada at that time, and didn’t paint in Brittany until after 1910. This image also suggests that it’s high in chroma, which would have been more likely during or after her time studying with Harry Gibb there, when her style became overtly Fauvist.

In 1907, Emily and her sister Alice travelled to see the sights of Alaska, where she was enthralled by the totem poles of Sitka. It was here that Emily Carr first resolved to document the totems and First Nations villages of British Columbia, which may have been influenced by Theodore J Richardson (1855-1914), an American artist who spent years documenting in his paintings the peoples of Sitka and Alaska more generally.

One of the places that she visited was Skagway (1907), painted here in watercolour. Then a bustling small city, it was the port of entry to the south-east ‘pan-handle’ of Alaska. It had expanded greatly with the gold rush of 1897 onwards, but by the time that the Carr sisters visited that was long since over, and the economy was in sustained decline.

The sisters also visited Baranof Island, where they saw the famous Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), shown in this watercolour. These totems were made by the Tlingit and Haida peoples, but had been removed from their original locations for display at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Following that, they were moved again into this newly constructed National Park.

Carr’s fascination with trees in the landscape developed early during her career. Her Arbutus Tree (c 1909) is a sophisticated watercolour portrait of one such tree, probably painted near Vancouver.

Beacon Hill Park (1909) is a watercolour in Impressionist style, showing a small corner of this 200 acre park in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. This overlooks Juan de Fuca Strait, and is shown here with the flowers of late spring or early summer, with arbutus trees in the distance. The Carr family home bordered on this park.

Carr also started painting distinctive works showing the dense trunks of a Wood Interior (1909), here lit powerfully by rays of low sunshine. This was to remain a recurrent motif throughout her career.

Alert Bay (1910) is another watercolour, showing a small village on Cormorant Island, at the opposite (north) end of Vancouver Island from Victoria. Home to the ‘Na̱mg̱is nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, this illustrates her rapidly developing interest in documenting the totems of the north-west coastal area.

In 1910, Carr returned to Paris with her sister Alice, for a further year of study. Again she found living in a big European city was stifling, and spent time in a spa in Sweden. She studied with Harry Phelan Gibb (1870-1948) at Crécy-en-Brie just outside Paris, and in Brittany. This was her first exposure to Fauvism, and proved a major influence on her style.

I suspect that Carr’s already high chroma has been further exaggerated in this image of her famous painting of Autumn in France (1911), representing her Fauvism at its height. She uses bold and confident brushstrokes rich with raw colour to show the countryside of Brittany in brilliant summer sunlight.

Two of Carr’s paintings were accepted for the autumn Salon in Paris in 1911. She returned to Vancouver in 1912, and promptly exhibited her Fauvist work in her studio there. She then set out on her project to document the First Nations peoples of the north-west coast, as I’ll relate in the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Ian M Thom (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.