Читать книгу Canadian Artists Bundle - Kate Braid - Страница 8

Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one…. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry.

– Emily Carr, Klee Wyck

On her way home to Victoria, Emily stopped for eight weeks to visit friends in the Cariboo district of British Columbia. Here she began to get better in the clean air and open spaces of B.C. ranch country. Her friends taught her to ride a horse astride instead of in the more “ladylike” sidesaddle position that women were expected to use, and she spent most of her time outdoors, riding.

Once again, Emily defies expectations of how “nice” ladies should act, by learning to ride her horse astride, instead of sidesaddle, while in the Cariboo district of British Columbia.

When she returned to Victoria, Emily seemed to her family more strong-headed than ever. Not only did she shock the entire neighbourhood by riding astride, but she’d also picked up the unladylike habits of smoking, swearing, and playing cards, and she refused to attend church regularly.

Most of her childhood friends had left Victoria. Sophie Pemberton was back in Victoria but she had married and now had other interests than art. Emily felt restless. She was deeply disappointed in how little she had learned in England and she was still not completely well. Her sisters were busy with their own lives: Lizzie was going to study physiotherapy in Seattle; Edith worked on charities; Alice had opened a new kindergarten. Emily sought comfort by heading back to Ucluelet for a while; then she and her birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and Billie – a sheepdog one of her sisters gave her – all moved to Vancouver, where she was hired to teach the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club.

Things immediately went bad. Knowing she had just returned from study “abroad,” the ladies assumed their new teacher would be witty, clever, and smartly dressed. Instead, they got a shy, fat, dowdy creature who smoked and swore at them. They had hired her to look at their paintings and give criticisms, suggest ways to improve, but it quickly became clear they didn’t take their art seriously enough for Emily Carr. Ladies came to class late. They re-posed the models. One refused Emily’s art criticisms altogether.

Being Emily, she took her revenge not by fading away but by going on the offensive. She considered their casual attitude to art a sacrilege and called them “vulgar, lazy old beasts.” When they snubbed her, she gave extra-harsh criticisms of their work. After one month, they fired her. Emily decided that from now on, she would concentrate on teaching children, who were easier to get along with.

Children taking classes from Miss Emily Carr at 570 Granville Street ran up the marble stairs to the second floor, past the Men’s Conservative Club and into a studio jammed with tables, easels, flowers, and animals. From one corner might come the tantalizing squeak of chipmunks and squirrels, busy building nests. The masked raccoons could be daintily washing their dinner while Jane the parrot and Sally the cockatoo screeched happily over the din. In the middle of it all, Billie the English sheepdog curled like a warm white rug for any child who needed a moment of quiet snuggling before returning to the fun of sketching a nursery rhyme or painting one of the bright bouquets at the window. Sometimes Miss Carr released the two white rats to play on the table. Then everyone grabbed their bread-erasers to save them from becoming a rat’s dinner. There was always tea, and snacks, and laughter.

On warm days she paraded her little company through the hallway, down the stairs, and along Georgia Street to the Vancouver wharves or to Stanley Park to sketch. Each child carried a camp stool and easel, and one held die basket from which Sally the cockatoo happily screeched, “Sally is a Sally! Sally is a Sally!”

When she wasn’t teaching, Emily worked on her own paintings, but her favourite activity was to lose herself and Billie on one of the many paths that threaded through the densely treed Stanley Park. She especially loved the solitude of a grove of seven huge cedars called the Seven Sisters. Although she no longer went to church regularly (“God got so stuffy squeezed into a church,” she once said) she was finding her holiness outside.

One day there was a knock at her studio door. She opened it to find a slim, barefooted woman about thirty years old with a baby on her back and two small children beside her. Sophie Frank was a Coast Salish woman who sold her handwoven baskets door to door. Emily especially liked one but she hadn’t enough money to buy it. Sophie offered to exchange it for used clothes the next time Emily came back from Victoria. In the meantime, she left the basket.

Emily was moved by the native woman’s trust in her. When she brought back a collection of used clothes that Sophie found acceptable, the two women began a lifelong friendship. Whenever Emily lived in Vancouver, Sophie dropped by for tea. And when Emily felt lonely she visited Sophie in her village on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. She would take the ferry across Burrard Inlet and the two women would visit in Sophie’s three-room house beside the Catholic Mission. In spite of Emily’s poor Chinook and Sophie’s broken English, they laughed easily together. Often there was a new baby to play with. Sometimes they sat silently on the church steps, watching the ferry cross to the North Shore, the canoes out fishing, and the children playing on the beach.

Sometimes Sophie put on her best skirt of plaid and black velvet and tied a yellow scarf around her head, and they would visit the graveyard with its collection of tiny gravestones belonging to Sophie’s many dead babies. One of them was named after Emily. Then they might walk to the church where Emily, although she was not Catholic, had the priest’s permission to cross herself with holy water and kneel with Sophie in front of the candles burning on the altar.

A portrait of Sophie hung in Emily’s studio. “There is a bond between us,” Emily said, “where color, creed, environment don’t count. The woman in us meets on Emily Carr_common ground and we love each other.”³ They remained friends until Sophie’s death in 1939.

The other way Emily eased her loneliness was by spending weekends with her sisters in Victoria. As long as they stayed at a certain distance from each other, they all seemed to get along.

In 1907, Emily and Alice took the Alaskan cruise on which Emily first saw the totem poles of Alert Bay and Sitka. It was on this trip that she decided to paint what she saw as the vanishing heritage of British Columbia’s First Nations.

The next summer and again in 1909 as soon as school ended, she boarded a steamship and, with Billie for company, sailed up the coast of Vancouver Island to Alert Bay, Campbell River, and to other Kwakwaka’wakw settlements that had a strong tradition of carving.⁴ On the mainland she travelled to Sechelt, Hope, Yale, and Lytton. She painted the large native community houses with their dramatic faces and the totem poles, always trying to be as precise and photographic as possible, because, she felt, she was working “for history.” By this time Emily was signing her paintings, “M. Emily Carr” or “M. Carr” or “M.E. Carr” to carefully distinguish herself from the other “E. Carrs,” Edith and Elizabeth. Toward the end of her career her paintings were usually signed simply, “Emily Carr.” By then there was no doubt, there was only one.

In 1908 Emily was a founding member of the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, but many of the artists there found her abrasive and hard to get along with. In fact, she was beginning to get a reputation as being a bit odd. She didn’t seem to care what people thought of her – or rather, she defied people to think whatever they liked. For Vancouverites, this was probably her greatest sin. Once, when a student caught her scrubbing her studio floor dressed in her bathing suit, Emily only laughed. People found it strange that she was always surrounded by animals.

And then there was her subject matter. Other artists had painted native villages before, but Miss Carr, they said, actually lived with the Indians while she painted them! Emily, who liked to shock, didn’t object to any of the growing talk about her. Most Indians seemed to accept her more easily than white people did, and she was always happier in small villages and in the forest than in big cities.

Vancouver art critics praised her work, but Emily wasn’t happy with it. She knew she had much more to learn. She had been to London. Now, she decided, she had saved enough money from her teaching to go to Paris where the “real” art was taking place. Alice would go with her as her translator. They arrived in Paris in August, 1910.

3 . Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, p. 108.

4 . At the time, the people there were called Kwakiutl, which is the anglicized form of Kwakwaka’wakw, pronounced Kwak-WAK-ya-wak.