Читать книгу Canadian Artists Bundle - Kate Braid - Страница 6

Artists from the Old World said our west was crude, unpaintable. Its bigness angered, its vastness and wild spaces terrified them.

–Emily Carr, Growing Pains

When Edith heard what Emily had done, she blackened, then suddenly smiled. Emily’s leaving would finally give Edith some peace and quiet as much as it would give Emily an education. But as the responsible one, she couldn’t let her sister simply disappear into the big city of San Francisco without a guiding eye.

Emily, “green as a cabbage” as an art student in San Francisco, about age 21.

“So you want to run away from authority? All right, I shall place you under the supervision of the Piddingtons!”

This was the same hated Piddington, the remittance man, who had made her seasick. Emily had forgotten that he and his wife were now living in San Francisco. When they left Victoria a few years before, she had been so glad to see them go, she hadn’t cared where they went. But even the fact that she must live with them didn’t dampen her joy at getting away from the ties of home and getting serious about her art, finally learning how to put together her love of art and her love of beautiful places.

Her ship sailed through the Golden Gate in the late summer of 1890, and San Francisco didn’t look at all wicked as it rose out of the fog. When Mrs. Piddington led her away from the wharf, Emily carried only her old straw suitcase and a birdcage holding her pet canary, Dick, in full molt. The Piddingtons gave her a small room at the top of the private hotel where they lived.

The art school, called the California School of Design, was over the old Pine Street Public Market in a poor part of the city. From the street, Emily walked up a dirty stair to a dark, airless office. Beyond that was the school itself, a huge room lit by a skylight with large windows on the north side. Under them, grey screens divided the hall into alcoves. In one corner was a closed door with a sign: Life Class, Keep Out.

Some students sat in long rows with lap boards. These drawing boards had fronts that rested on students’ laps and wide-spread hind legs that rested on the floor. Other students stood drawing at easels. They drew vegetable and animal still lifes so old they’d begun to rot, or they copied plaster images that stood on pedestals in the middle of the room.

The room was filthy. Blackened crusts of bread that students used for charcoal erasers dotted the floor. The air smelled of rats, and dead fish and birds, and rotting vegetables. Men and women wore smocks or painting pinafores smeared in layers of charcoal and paint. Emily bought charcoal and paper from the office and took her place in the long row of students under the windows. It wasn’t quite what she had expected, but her education in art had finally begun.

The art taught at the California School of Design was old-fashioned. Though the director had recently studied in Paris, neither his teaching nor his own painting reflected the more modern art going on in France. Years later, Emily recognized that the art she brought home was “humdrum and unemotional,” but she was beginning to learn her craft.

Emily’s nickname in San Francisco was “Dummy.” Perhaps it was because emotionally she was still young and very, very shy. She couldn’t bear – even for art’s sake – to take Life Classes that would mean having to draw a nude model, but she loved the Wednesday morning outdoor sketching sessions when the students set their easels up in cow pastures or on vacant lots. Outdoors, Emily found texture, shape, and space. As she sketched, half awake, half dreaming, she felt completely engaged with the landscape – body and soul.

Back in her boarding house, Mrs. Piddington watched Emily closely and called her “my dear” in the English way Emily hated because she was sure Mrs. Piddington didn’t mean it. One day Mrs. Piddington wondered aloud how Emily could have managed to get through a huge crowd outside so quickly because when Mrs. Piddington left the house right after Emily, she couldn’t move for all the people coming out of the cathedral.

Emily replied she’d found a nice, quiet side street: “The house doors opened so quaintly right onto the pavement,” she explained. “All the windows had close green shutters; nearly every shutter had a lady peeping through. There was a red lantern hanging over each door. It was all romantic, like old songs and old books!”

“Stop it! Little donkey!” shouted Mrs. Piddington, and told Emily she’d just walked through San Francisco’s notorious red light district.

“What is a red light district?”

“A place of prostitutes.”

“What are prostitutes?”

That evening after supper, Mrs. Piddington pulled her chair so close to Emily’s, their knees touched.

“Sit there, little fool,” she ordered. “Your sister has no right to send you out into the world as green as a cabbage. Listen!”

Half an hour later, Emily crept up the stairs to her room, afraid of every shadow, every door. Mrs.

Piddington had told her that evil lurked everywhere in San Francisco. There were opium dens, she said, and drug addicts, kidnappings, prostitution, murders. The very sidewalks could open up and swallow a young woman and she would be taken into something called “white slavery” and never heard from again. Even the art school district, Mrs. Piddington warned, was very, very dangerous.

Emily locked the door tight behind her and crept to the window. As she stared outside at the “evil” city, she touched the canary’s cage and felt his familiar nibble on her finger. After a while, she said out loud, “Dick, I don’t believe it, not at all. If it was as wicked as she said the black would come up the chimneys and smudge the sky; wicked ones can shut their doors and windows but not their chimneys. There is direct communication always between the inside of the houses and the sky…. San Francisco’s sky is clear and high and blue.” Mrs. Piddington had warned her never, ever to go off the main streets, never to speak to anyone and never to answer if anyone spoke to her. “I’ll do that,” Emily solemnly told her small, yellow bird. “But all the rest I am going to forget!”

No doubt Mrs. Piddington sent a letter back to Edith in Victoria, telling her that although Emily was working hard at school, she was taking liberties. She had not only discovered Grant Street but she was taking guitar lessons (had even joined a club) and only went to church where and when she felt like it. Perhaps the Carr sisters found themselves free to leave Victoria for a year, or they were curious and wanted to share her adventure, or simply to be closer to Dick, who now had tuberculosis like his mother and was in a sanatorium in southern California. Perhaps they didn’t trust Emily, alone in the big city with her silly plan to become an artist. Whatever the reason, in Emily’s second year in San Francisco, Edith, Lizzie, and Alice all came to stay with her for one year. While they were there, they insisted she come with them on visits and family outings, and Emily worried that she wasn’t working hard enough at her art.

At school, she moved from the drawing of plaster casts to painting still lifes under a professor with “ogle-eyes” who she was afraid of.

His main suggestions to her were, “Scrape, repaint.” Over and over. “Scrape, repaint.” Sometimes he just roared, “Scrape!” One day when he had done that four times in a row, Emily shouted back, “I have, and I have, and I have!”

“Then scrape again!”

In a fury she scraped the paint off her canvas and wiped the oily mess on a rag. Then she threw new paint onto the canvas, grabbed her paint box, and ran out of the studio in order to hide her tears.

When she had gone, one of the students told the teacher he was hard on the little Canadian.

“Too bad, too bad!” he said. “But look there!” and pointed to the painting. “Capital! Spirit! Colour! It has to be tormented out of the girl, though. Make her mad, and she can paint.”

Before Emily could finish her course, she was called home by her guardian because, he said, she had “played at art” long enough. Probably there was not enough money left to support her. After three years in San Francisco, Emily returned to Victoria.

Emily’s sisters, although they loved her, continued to be both over-protective and critical of her, the baby of the family, and Emily was often cross with them. Her sisters were among the founders of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the YWCA, and because there was not yet a headquarters in Victoria, people often came to the Carr house to talk and pray. Her sister Lizzie wanted to be a missionary, and Emily hated it that their house was now full of what she called “the missionary blight.”

Proper Victorian women didn’t usually work outside the home, but the Carr family was now in what was called, “reduced circumstances.” With four sisters at home and brother Dick in hospital in California, Emily had to earn an income, and although at first she felt a little afraid of her pupils, she began to teach drawing to children in the family dining room.

But the room was too dark. The children created mess and noise and there was trouble with her sisters after every class, and so, feeling brave after her taste of independence in California, Emily asked Edith if she could use the loft of the old cow barn for a studio.

Reluctantly, Edith agreed. The barn was in poor repair. Emily used all her money to pay a carpenter to fix the leaky roof, but still there was a problem because the loft, like the dining room, didn’t have enough light for painting. With no money left, Emily and Bong, the family servant, tackled the problem themselves. They fitted two old windows into the roof to make a skylight. They fixed the leaks, put in a stove, blocked the pigeon holes, and burlapped the walls. Soon, even if it smelled a bit like cow, Emily was cozy and warm with her students above and the warm, snuffing noises of the old cow chewing below. Outside on the roof, a beautiful peacock began to come to preen, using the dormer window as his mirror.

Before long there were several students attending Miss Carr’s art classes in the loft above the cow barn. Emily was a natural teacher, almost as playful as the children. If they got too noisy, she would drop through the trap door into the cow’s manger, creep through the barn, and run up the studio stairs to surprise them and set them back to work.

She also continued her own work, changing from the art school focus on portrait and still life toward landscape. In those days in Victoria, the only place an artist could exhibit was among the crocheted afghans and fresh-baked pies at the Victoria fall fair, and twice, Emily’s pen and ink drawings won first prize.

In the summer of 1898, Emily took the steamer Willipa to Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island to visit her sister Lizzie. She stayed in the small mission house near the reserve where about two hundred members of the Ucluelet band of the Nootka (now called Nuu-chah-nulth) nation lived.

To her, this way of life outside the city was all new. She loved having so few rules, being on the shore between the vast calm of sea and of forest. She loved being outside all day in the fresh air, eating fresh fish, wandering as she liked. Time slowed down and people let her do mostly as she pleased. The prisoner of strict Victorian rules and manners could feel her chains being loosened.

One day soon after she arrived, the chief – who was said to be a “reader of faces” – visited her in the missionary’s house. He sat on top of the medicine cabinet, his hands gripping the edge, elbows braced, and stared hard into Emily’s eyes. After a while he looked up, said a few sentences in Chinook Jargon (the trading language), and returned to the village.

Emily asked a little nervously, “What did he say?”

“That you had no fear,” the missionary told her, “that you were not stuck up, and that you knew how to laugh.”

The native people gave her the name “Klee Wyck,” the Laughing One, and she quickly made friends in their community. Without speaking either Chinook Jargon or the local native language, and using only gestures and facial expressions, she received permission to visit them and sketch in the great houses that were home to several families. But it never occurred to her to paint the forest. The Canadian forest was still too vast to imagine trying to express it in paint.

Living conditions on the reserve were poor. There was little work for the men, and many people were fatally ill with German measles, whooping cough, or tuberculosis. Residents were sick at heart, and perhaps because of this, there was widespread drinking and gambling.

Emily felt great sympathy and she firmly blamed Europeans for the natives’ dispirited condition. She especially blamed the missionaries, who called traditional ways “ungodly” and taught native people to be ashamed of their heritage.

Her sympathetic response was unusual for the time. Most white people in British Columbia, although they had relied heavily on the skills and kindness of First Nations people to help them adjust to a new country, by the 1870s were hostile, and regarded most native people as “drunks and idlers.”

Her visit to Ucluelet was the first time Emily found comfort and pleasure in the company of First Nations people. Unlike most of the white people she knew, native people left her alone. She didn’t feel lectured or scolded or disapproved of. Mostly they accepted her presence in silence, and so, in their company she could focus on her passion – her art.

On the steamship home, Emily became friends with the ship’s purser, William “Mayo” Paddon, son of an Anglican priest in Victoria. Mayo soon became a frequent visitor to the Carr house. He and Emily walked and talked together through the park and along the cliffs above the sea. Emily even attended his church, the Holy Saviour. Mayo, who was deeply religious, was drawn to Emily because he found her the same, in spite of her rebellion against what she saw as the hypocrisy and mistakes of the church.

He proposed marriage more than once, but Emily turned him down, although one time she almost changed her mind. It happened when she told him about a time when Edith was furious at her (again) and trying to shame her. Edith had said, “Poor Mother worried about leaving you. She was happy about her other children, knowing she could trust them to behave – good reasonable children – you are different!” It hurt Emily’s feelings badly, and for years she cried over it until Mayo whispered in her ear, “Don’t cry, little girl. If you were the naughtiest, you can bet your mother loved you a tiny bit the best – that’s the way mothers are.” For that, she said, she almost loved him.

But not enough to marry him. Apart from the fact that all her life she was bashful about her body and squeamish about sex, Emily, like every Victorian woman, knew that her duty when she married was to bear children and care for her husband and family. (Partly, a woman had no choice but to bear children; these were the days before birth control.) At best, the woman’s own interests – like art – must take second place. Emily wasn’t ready for that. Besides, by now there was enough money in the shoes. One of her friends from Victoria, Sophie Pemberton, had had great success studying in England and was now making her artistic debut in Paris. In 1899, Emily announced to Mayo and her family, “I’m going to London to study!”

The trip was a difficult one. Emily could not go on the water without being seasick. For the entire voyage to England she was violently ill.