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On 4 March 1930 (almost exactly 15 years before her death on 2 March 1945) Emily Carr made, as far as I know, her only formal public address.^[A] The occasion was a meeting in the Crystal Garden of the Victoria Women’s Canadian Club—the meeting to celebrate Emily Carr’s first one-man show in her native city.

[A] Mr. Dilworth was incorrect on this point.

There is plenty of evidence that the occasion was considered to be an important one. In spite of the fact that she was always scornful about “talk” in connection with painting, Miss Carr herself was very excited by the invitation to speak and took great pains in the preparation of her address—it survives in a perfectly “clean” typescript. She was troubled during the preparation of the talk by the fact that her beloved monkey, Woo, was taken violently ill. While Emily was occupied with writing the address, Woo appropriated and devoured a tube of yellow paint, and, despite the efforts of a veterinary and everything Emily could do herself was in very serious condition. A day before the event Emily refused flatly to give the talk unless Woo was better, and indeed it was only a few hours before the time for the address that she finally agreed, Woo having taken a definite turn for the better. She has made an amusing and, at the same time, pathetic reference to this experience in “The Life of Woo.” Its closing sentences are: “The talk went over on the crest of such happy thanksgiving, it made a hit. The credit belonged to Woo’s tough constitution.”

Two days prior to the address the Victoria Daily Colonist carried an interesting article by Ludewyck Bosch, an artist and critic visiting in Victoria. He spoke of his amazement on first seeing the paintings of Emily Carr and of his astonishment that they were not better and more favourably known by Canadians. He also noted the fact that an exhibition was being held. He said: “We are really very glad to hear that through the medium of the Women’s Canadian Club an exhibition of Miss Carr’s work will be held at the Crystal Garden on March 4th. While this exhibition is for one day only we have no doubt that the Canadian government, which has already done so much for Canadian art, will not let this opportunity pass unnoticed. Certainly it will know how to acknowledge and honour its great artists.”

Whether the credit must go to Woo and her tough constitution or not, the address was a great success. Both the Victoria daily papers gave it wide publicity in their issues of 4 March. The Daily Colonist said in part: “An eloquent plea for a more tolerant and sympathetic view of modern art was made by Miss Emily Carr, a Victoria artist, who is at the same time one of Canada’s recognized leading exponents of the new movement, in the course of an address which she gave yesterday afternoon before an audience which filled the Crystal Garden concert hall to its utmost capacity. In her exhibition of fifty or more canvases depicting West Coast Indian totems and village scenes, Miss Carr had an even more powerful argument than she advanced in her searchingly clever, humorous and analytical talk, although the latter helped many to examine the pictures with a fresh understanding and appreciation. The tremendous interest which the subject has for Victorians was amply demonstrated in the unusually big attendance, which constitutes something in the nature of a record in the club annals. And the eagerness of many nonmembers to see the pictures has resulted in arrangements being made by the Crystal Garden management to continue the exhibition today and tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.”

These comments were paralleled by the Victoria Daily Times. After a quite lengthy quotation from the address, the Times reporter went on to say: “The foregoing summarizes the earnest plea made by Miss Emily Carr, noted Victoria artist, before the Women’s Canadian Club yesterday afternoon for a greater spirit of tolerance and understanding towards the modern artist who, striving to portray not merely the photographic delineations of Canada’s beauty, but the very spirit and soul of its majestic appeal, deserts the traditional school of art for that of the impressionist.

“Miss Carr’s plea was made the more forceful by the exhibition of her pictures, held in the Crystal Garden gallery, in conjunction with the address. Two distinct phases in the development of her art were apparent in the collection, the first, while virile and powerful in design, tending more to the ‘photographic’ interpretation of scenes at the Indian villages on the west coast and in other parts of the Province, while her later work showed a groping after and a conception of the spirit underlying the primitive art of the Indians, as expressed in her amazing studies of totem poles. The pictures will remain on view to the public at the Crystal Garden gallery today and tomorrow from 10 until 5 o’clock.”

The address is typical of Emily Carr. It is forthright, challenging, down-to-earth, witty. It reflects the philosophy of her whole life as a painter, a philosophy which was centred around an insistence on complete integrity, independence, and honesty, a philosophy which she adhered to, lived and worked within throughout her whole career. She believed firmly that the artist must speak clearly to people, must speak in terms of actual experience but must address particularly the spirit and the soul. She was always, and increasingly in her middle and later years, opposed to photographic realism in painting. She felt that there was a much higher role for the true artist and of this he must be aware, and this role he must play.

There is a most interesting brief passage in one of Emily’s “Journals” where she put the whole thing very clearly: “Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul. You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That’s all right, you are feeling your way into the thing. But don’t take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it’s you yourself that have made sure of it, till it’s yours absolutely by conviction. It’s stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you’ll fall in a hole.... If you’re going to lick the icing off somebody else’s cake you won’t be nourished and it won’t do you any good—or you might find the cake had carraway seeds and you hate them. But if you make your own cake and know the recipe and stir the thing with your own hands it’s your own cake. You can ice it or not as you like. Such lots of folks are licking the icing off the other fellow’s cake!”

The address which is now published for the first time and the notices in the contemporary press of Victoria are interesting and significant. They show a degree of public interest in Emily Carr’s work as a painter which has perhaps not always been realized as existing at so early a date as 1930. True, she had had her exhibition in Ottawa some four years earlier. She had contributed single canvases to exhibitions in Eastern Canada, in Vancouver, in the United States, and even in Europe, but the Victoria exhibition of her paintings together with the opportunity given her to speak of her work is a very important point in the history of public reaction to her painting. Unfortunately, the interest indicated in the newspapers was not sustained and Miss Carr had a long period of struggle and only semi-recognition ahead of her. Indeed, final recognition did not come until her books began to be published by the Oxford University Press—the first of them, Klee Wyck, in 1941. This volume and others that followed attracted a new kind of attention from a new group of people to the work of this extraordinary woman.

I am very grateful to be associated with the Oxford University Press in the publication of this unusual address in this tenth anniversary year of Emily Carr’s death.

IRA DILWORTH

Vancouver, British Columbia

1955