Читать книгу Canadian Artists Bundle - Kate Braid - Страница 13

Emily, don’t you know by now that you’re an oddment and a natural-born “solitaire’? There is no cluster or sunburst about you. You’re just a paste solitaire in a steel claw setting.

– Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands

In 1930 Emily made her last trip to northern British Columbia. Not only was her art changing, but she was almost fifty-nine years old. It is a sign of her extraordinary commitment that she continued these rigorous trips for as long as she did.

By now, she was beginning to exhibit more widely. She had shown or would soon show her work in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery in Ottawa (in 1929 and 1930 as well as in 1927), in the Ontario Society of Artists exhibitions, and finally, after an eleven-year gap, at the Island Arts and Crafts Society in Victoria. There were inquiries from Edmonton, Calgary, and Toronto and from American galleries in Rochester and Buffalo. The only city in which it was certain her work would be unwelcome was Vancouver. Art criticism there was very conservative, and “modern” artists like Carr and the Group of Seven were still ridiculed or ignored.

Emily Carr with friends and pets (Woo on her shoulder), camping in “the Elephant.”

Summers in the Elephant were some of the happiest in her life.

After Emily paintings received a favourable response at the 1927 show at the National Gallery, even Victoria had begun to soften. Eric Brown and Marius Barbeau both praised her work whenever they were in Victoria, and the local press now boasted about her. But Emily was suspicious. She thought her fellow citizens were not so much impressed by her work, as by the fact that people in the East liked it, and this hurt her.

In 1930, when Emily went east again to attend her first solo exhibition in eastern Canada – at the Canadian National Railway’s ticket office in Ottawa – people in Ontario found her less shy and more confident. Everyone was enthusiastic about her work, including Lawren Harris, who talked to her again of how theosophy affected his life and strengthened his experience of nature. On this trip, Emily also overcame her dislike of large cities, which had not been kind to her in the past, and gathered her courage to visit the art galleries of New York. Briefly she met the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose paintings she found “beautiful.” She especially liked Lawrence Pine Tree, with Stars and the Jack-in-the-Pulpit series.

But in spite of these successes, the early 1930s were years of great struggle for her. In January 1931, Emily wrote, “My aims are changing and I feel lost and perplexed.”

Spiritually, it was a time of religious search that – eventually – brought her back to Christianity. The 1930s were a time of economic depression with thousands of people homeless and unemployed, unable to afford high rents or sometimes, rents of any kind. With such unsettled conditions, many were willing to explore radical political, economic, and spiritual alternatives, including various Pentecostal and nontraditional religions.

Emily changed from being one who avoided churches to one who attended regularly, although she didn’t go to churches of which her sisters would approve. The family’s church was Reformed Episcopalian, but for a time, Emily was drawn to the Victoria Unity Centre, which had grown up during the Depression as an alternative to the materialism of the Christian church. She regularly attended services and faith healings and even unsuccessfully petitioned the Centre to bring the famous Father Divine to Victoria.⁵

She explored various philosophies and attended the lectures of several different religious speakers, always trying to see the divine “manifest” in nature so she could express this in her painting. She asked her-self, “What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess, that you want? Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self, until the God quality in me is in tune with the God in it.”

She drove herself hard, never letting herself get smug or comfortable. In Victoria she wrote, “My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.” She wanted her things to “rock and sway with the breath and fluids of life” but worried that instead, “they sit, weak and still.” In 1933 when she got some paintings back from an exhibition and had a chance to take a fresh look at them, she despaired again. “Oh, I am frightened when I look at my painting!” she exclaimed. “There is nothing to it, just paint, dead and forlorn, getting nowhere. It lacks and lacks. The paint chokes me and I ache.”

As if to cleanse body as well as mind, she fasted on orange juice and eggs and pored over the poems of Walt Whitman and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She particularly liked Whitmans optimism and, no doubt, his joyous disregard for tradition. She learned sections of Leaves of Grass by heart – ignoring, of course, the “fleshy” bits. Some parts of Whitman must have read to her as if he was spurring her on from the grave. “The earth does not argue,” Whitman wrote, “Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.” These were certainly words that a woman who felt “shut out” for much of her life would have valued.

She constantly questioned the quality of her work. Although she craved compliments, she could hardly believe people who told her the paintings were good. “Why can’t I take all the nice things they say like a dainty dish one is offered by a hostess?” But no, she was sure those who praised her couldn’t know “good work” or how could they praise hers? And yet if praise didn’t come from the right people, she flew into a fury and refused to speak or write to them, sometimes ever again.

In the summer of 1931 she went to Coldstream Flats north of Victoria, to try to capture in her sketches the free, swinging motion of its large cedar trees. Perhaps their grace reminded her of the old cow ambling across Small’s cow yard, the looseness of its red and white body swaying as if in a high wind. By now, Emily had a certain routine. She walked into the woods, perhaps tripping a bit, and looked for an open space in which to set her camp stool. When she found it, she simply sat and smoked a cigarette and waited. Slowly, things began to move. Air slipped between the leaves of trees, sunlight began to dance, and colours came out until everything was alive, full of sound and shape and shadow. Then, with her sketch board in front of her, she unfocused her eyes a little, straightened her arm, and began to paint or draw with large, flowing strokes that echoed the sweep and ease of the cedar boughs dancing above her.

She was also using a different medium. In the past Emily had used artists oil paints or charcoal, which worked well in the rain. But now, driven partly by financial need, she bought several one-gallon cans of good quality house paint, thinned them with lots of gasoline, and began painting on large sheets of Manila paper. Using broad bristle brushes she could get the fresh colour and quick drying effects of watercolour, with the colour intensity of oils. Most importantly, the cheaper materials let her feel free to play with her medium, to experiment and make mistakes. Many of the sketches she painted in this way were so full of spontaneity and energy that they became finished pieces, and Emily used the technique even in her studio.

Lawren Harris raved about these latest sketches, telling her they were “unusually individual” and “saturated with what you are after.”

Emily was still running the boarding house, but it had ceased to dominate her life. She also had several dogs, but she didn’t keep a commercial kennel. She had Woo, a cage full of chipmunks, and a cat. But finances continued to be very tight. Her two bottom-floor suites stood empty through the summer and fall of 1932.

In the fall of 1932 she caught her baker and a stranger peering in her studio windows. Furious at this invasion of her privacy, she raced out the door to the balcony where they stood.

“How dare you stare into my window? Go away.”

The baker apologized and explained that, “We didn’t mean to be rude – this ’ere feller,” thumbing toward the stranger, “loves pictures. Come along, I sez, I’ll show you!”

It gave Emily an idea. For some time she had thought Victoria needed an art gallery, although what she imagined was a noncommercial place where families of “all classes, all nationalities, all colours” could come to appreciate fine art. She imagined lectures and study groups and special help for young artists. If the cautious folk of Victoria’s Island Arts and Crafts Society didn’t like her art, maybe others would. She would give an exhibition for “ordinary” people and invite the general public.

“The People’s Gallery,” as she called it, was to be in the two empty suites on her main floor. She promptly had a door cut between them and hung an exhibition of her own with three other painters, including Lee Nam, who had been refused admittance to the Arts and Crafts Sketching Class.

The exhibition was so successful that several people began to work with Emily on the idea of creating a permanent People’s Art Gallery, a place where ordinary people walking through Beacon Hill Park on a Sunday could drop by, rest at the open fire, and see some art before going home.

Emily sent out invitations, and on December 14, the day after her sixty-first birthday, a meeting was held at Hill House. About forty people were present, including several members of City Council, a few members of the Island Arts and Crafts Society, and a reporter from the Victoria Colonist. Jack Shadbolt called the meeting to order.

According to the article published the next day in the Colonist, Miss Carr explained to those present that Victoria needed more exhibition space, space in which ordinary people felt comfortable and everyone felt wel-come, including those who had been banned from the Arts and Crafts Society. (Presumably she meant people like the young Chinese artist Lee Nam, who had been banned “because of his nationality.”) They didn’t need a lot of money – the Gallery could be modest – but even a modest gallery required the financial and moral support of many people.

At first there was great enthusiasm. A committee was formed and donations called for. Emily offered to rent the Gallery to the city at the “lowest possible rent,” and Eric Brown of the National Gallery in Ottawa promised to send exhibitions from the East.

But by January it was clear that although there was plenty of interest, the people with money were not willing to open their wallets. No doubt there was also some concern that eccentric, bad-tempered old Emily Carr might not be the most desirable curator of the place. It was finally decided that if Victoria couldn’t produce something better than Vancouver’s new art gallery, they would do nothing at all. Emily resealed her door and rented out the two lower suites.

In letters, she continued to ask Harris about his religion. She believed his God was the same as her own, but she was worried by the fact that theosophists did not pray and denied the divinity of Christ.

On a trip to Toronto in 1933 she had several long talks with Harris and with Bess and Fred Housser about their theosophical beliefs. If she could understand their attitude to God, she thought, it might help her find her own way as an artist. But that night she slept badly. She awoke at 5:00 a.m. feeling “soul-sick” and “churned by the whiz of it.” How could she live with no Bible, no Christ, no prayer as she had always known them?

Back in Victoria, she wrote and told Harris she could not accept theosophy. Emily went back to the “plain Bible” of her childhood faith, and they never mentioned the matter again.

But she believed more firmly than ever that there was a spiritual quality to art. The artist didn’t have to be religious in the organized sense; to be deeply sincere was itself a religion. What was vital was to find and tap into the “one substance, one life…that flows through all.”

What she now sought for herself, with all her heart and body, was a way to express that sense of something beyond the material, to be a channel, “clear, open, receptive” as she searched for the “divine” in everything.

Emily’s oldest friends were still her sisters, although Edith had died in 1919. “The girls” – Lizzie and Alice – were very different from Emily and each of the three women was impatient and critical with the others, but they were tied to each other by the bonds of family, habit, and affection. It pained Emily that her sisters didn’t like her art in the ways she wished they would, although she still thought they were “the finest women ever.”

All three sisters lived within easy walking distance of each other on the original family acreage, so it was easy to get together every Sunday at Alice’s school-house for dinner, for birthdays, and for Christmases. As long as she was a landlady, Emily also tromped over for frequent lunches and to visit.

Over lunch, as she recited the latest atrocities of her tenants, Alice would say little, Lizzie would side with the tenant, and there would be a clash. Usually Emily was told to behave as a good landlady and sent right back, and she felt yet again like the unsuccessful black sheep of the family. But her sisters remained her closest friends, and it was a great joy to her when, in 1933, Alice finally said that she thought some of Emily’s sketches were “wonderful.” Lizzie later also saw something she liked in Emily’s work for the first time.

Other old friends included Willie Newcombe, the son of Dr. Newcombe who had inspected Emily’s paintings for the provincial government in 1912. Willie was a friend, a naturalist, and a handyman.

Flora Burns was the daughter of one of Emily’s earliest supporters in Victoria. In the 1920s, when Flora and Emily confessed to each other that they both liked to write, they took a correspondence course together. They read their short stories to one another and exchanged criticisms. Later, Ruth Humphrey, an English teacher at Victoria College, and Margaret Clay, a librarian at the Victoria Public Library, also gave Emily feedback on her stories. Emily called them her “listening ladies.”

Their job was mostly to cheer Emily on – a role with which Emily felt comfortable. She didn’t like competition or criticism, which may be partly why her friendships with several young Victoria artists in the 1930s were not very happy. Max Maynard, Jack Shadbolt (later one of Canada’s leading painters), and John McDonald all liked to come to her studio, see her latest work, and talk about art. All three thought her work some of the best in the province and acknowledged her influence on their own art.

But their easy male confidence intimidated her. Emily was always uncomfortable with art criticism, and as the men talked – “spouting jargon” as she called it – she felt more and more stupid. She became increasingly abrupt with them. When she saw signs of her influence in their work, rather than take it as a compliment (young artists modelling on an older one), she was sure they were stealing her ideas.

Part of her defensiveness may have had to do with arrogance on their part. Maynard once told her women can’t paint. Emily, he quickly explained, was an exception. But Emily had heard too much of this sort of talk before. When the men moved to Vancouver, she found it easier to be friendly from a distance.

Always, if Emily felt under attack, she snapped back. She could be a good friend, but she lost her temper easily – and was often sorry after. In her fear of being rejected, she rejected others first, before they could reject her – or her work. The one artist with whom she was close at this time was Edythe Hembroff. They met when Emily read in the newspaper that Edythe had just come back from studying art in France, and invited her to tea. The two were different in many ways but they liked each other immediately, and for three years they painted together almost every day.

During the early 1930s Emily became distanced from the members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because of her own sharp temper and her quickness to feel slighted, but partly also it was her increasing confidence in her own work.

Officially, the Group had dissolved and formed a larger organization, the Canadian Group of Painters, of which Emily was a charter member. In 1933 when she sent sixteen of her new paint and paper sketches east for their comments, Emily was disappointed in their feedback. She thought the freshness and courage of their earlier painting was gone and that none of them had changed their style, while Emilys continued to develop. For years she had been dependent on their criticisms but soon she would write in her journal, “Now they are torn away and I stand alone,” (“alone” was underlined), “on my own perfectly good feet. Now I take my own soul as my critic.”

She even suffered a cooling (though never an end) to her relationship with Lawren Harris. When Bess Housser and Lawren Harris announced their plan to divorce their spouses and marry each other, Emily was deeply offended. She always held conservative sexual attitudes and although she liked them both, she felt she couldn’t trust them again. Harris continued to write to Emily, and (after 1940, when he and Bess moved to Vancouver,) to visit her, but their relationship was never the same.

This was partly because Emily was beginning to see some of the differences between Harris’s work and goals and her own. His paintings, she thought, were too cold, too finished, almost static. “They take you to their destination and leave you,” she said. In her own work, movement was now all-important. She was trying to make her paintings express the heat of “growing, not stopping, being still on the move.”

But she never stopped acknowledging his importance to her. Just before her death she wrote of him that his “work and example did more to influence my outlook upon art than any school or any master.”

Emily was developing a new style, one in which rhythm was dominant. Perhaps as a reflection of her growing spiritual confidence in the “continuous process of life, eternally changing,” her paintings lighten. Space is no longer heavily carved but moves. In 1930 in New York she had seen Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit series of paintings. Now, in the canvas, Tree, Emily, like O’Keeffe, focuses the viewer in tight, to a single aspect of the tree, emphasizing the grace of its rising trunk with only a glimpse of green draperies falling around it. This painting also shares the feeling of inner tension of the totem poles. When describing forest, she exclaimed how it affected her, “surging with being, palpitating with overpowering, terrific life, life, life.” Emily also began to look above the trees to the sky, which she sought to make “roomy and moving and mysterious.” She still painted totem poles – mostly from older sketches – but this work, too, showed a new confidence, a new rhythm, as if she was now seeing the totem poles through her own eyes.

Until now, her sketching trips around Victoria had been limited by where she could find a cabin to rent, but in 1933 she solved that problem. Ever since she was a child reading stories about the gypsies or Roma people, she had dreamed of owning a caravan. Now, with the proceeds from the sale of one of her paintings, she bought a rickety trailer, dubbed it “the Elephant,” and built in it a bed for herself, sleeping spaces for the animals, a meat safe, kerosene stove, and bookshelves. She also built a large canvas tarpaulin on one side where she could cook and heat the water for her hot water bottle on rainy days.

Now every spring and fall Emily had the Elephant towed to some place near Victoria where she spent several weeks sketching. She felt, she said, like “Mrs. Noah” with all her creatures – including Woo the monkey, happily ensconced in a tree, and Susie the rat, tucked into a corner in her oatmeal container.

Susie travelled everywhere with Emily, partly because no one else could stand her. Lizzie and Alice had finally come to accept Woo, the monkey, even though she once kept Alice cornered for hours in the back shed. But a rat was a rat, and the sisters wouldn’t have it near them. So Susie stayed in the oatmeal carton or kept Emily company inside the collar of her jacket as Emily sketched. The animal was so devoted that she wouldn’t leave, even if the Elephant’s door was left open. In Victoria, if her cage in the studio was not securely locked at night, she’d struggle up the steep studio stairs to sleep on Emily’s pillow.

The first time Emily lumbered out in the Elephant was in the late summer of 1933, back to Goldstream Flats. She confided to her journal how on most nights, when everyone else was in bed, she put on a “nondescript garment” and lay down on the stones in the river for her bath and let the water ripple over her sixty-two-year-old skin. When she was “scrubbed down with a hard brush” and back in bed with a hot water bottle, she felt “like a million dollars” with everyone peacefully asleep and the trees and river whispering around her. Outdoors was always where she felt happiest.

It was on these trips in the Elephant that Emily finally found a way to express the moving spirit she had been seeking in nature. She had a dream in which she saw an ordinary wooded hillside suddenly come alive, “weighted with sap, burning green in every leaf.” After that, she said, “growing green” became something different to her.

For the next few years, in paintings such as Above the Gravel Pit, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, and Sky, all the elements of her painting came together to show flow and rhythm, what she called the “organized chaos of growth.” She had come to terms with her fear and was painting her own vision. When the weather was bad or if she wasn’t in the mood to sketch, she wrote stories. “These were the happiest days of my life,” she later said.

Lawren Harris now urged her to take the next step and move into the purely abstract, as he had done, away from the representation of actual objects and into a landscape of curves and cones. But Emily held back. Though she was very interested, she wasn’t entirely sure what Harris meant when he talked to her of “abstraction” in art. She knew that when she looked at his work she was moved. She was afraid that if she left forest images, her own work would be merely decorative. Instead, she “clung to earth…her density, her herbage, her juice” and continued to paint the familiar, identifiable forest.