By NIGEL MORGAN

| December 13 of this 100th anniver-
Sary of British Columbia’s entry into
‘ ‘Confederation is also the centennial of

‘the birth of Emily Carr, one of Can-
ada’s most talented artists and one of
British Columbia’s most distinguished
<q Women.

a I had the good fortune of making
Emily Carr’s acquaintance back in
; 35 years ago, at a time when
this unusually talented, if somewhat
/€ccentric, Victorian was still largely
‘Unappreciated and even ridiculed and
‘Scorned by some “nice” citizens of
'B.C.’s capital. It remains a great trag-
edly of those years that Emily Carr’s
Magnificent artistry and extraordinar-
ily vivid writing received but grudging
Tecognition from all but a handful in
Victoria until 15 years after her death.
Emily Carr was a great painter. For
Originality, versatility and sheer
| Creative driving power, she had few
€quals. Born to a merchant family,
| Which she tells us “had neither pro-
duced an artist nor even known one,”
‘in this quiet provincial capital, which
) She described 40 year. iaier as ‘“‘the
‘Most hopeless place artistically in the
Dominion,” her ability to draw showed
itself. early in life.

Emily Carr was an intensely inter-
€sting person—warmly human, color-
ful, outspoken and above all a rebel
pe osophically, artistically and social-
y.

She was “contrary from the start”
She humorously admitted in her auto-
biography, refusing to be born promptly
and thus causing her merchant father
Some inconvenience. She had a tremen-
i dous capacity for friendship, although
; She could be cuttingly sharp towards
C those she considered to be pretentious
4 0° hypocritical. She despised and re-
p Jected the ‘“convention-bound,” and
. the “hypocrisy of the polite social pat-
id tern” she observed around her.

Of her own writing she once said ©

| Characteristically: “I know my me-
i Chanics are poor. I realize that when I
5 Tead good literature, but I know lots
d Of excellently written stuff that says
| Nothing. Is it better to say nothing
' bolitely, or to say something poorly?...
| Flora is correcting and it galls me,” she
{ declared. “She has command of Eng-
’ lish; I have not. I am glad of the help;
| I want it. But when she and Ruth finish
5 with them, I hate my manuscripts. I
i feel that the writer (me) is a pedantic
| Prig. If they’d only punctuate and let
/Me be and leave them at the best I
ican do . . .” Again in her autobio-
ial she wrote, “It was not the

‘| I got to know Emily Carr first not
¢ SO much as an artist but as a fearless
€ and outspoken thinker with whom (as
i: native Islander) I shared a deep-

Pacific Coast peoples artist

going concern about our Indian people,
and a love of nature and the great out-
doors. Who, among those who had the
good fortune to know Emily Carr,
could ever forget her terrific love of
life; her gentleness towards her fel-

low humans, towards animals, and

particularly towards the menagerie of
pets — birds, chipmunks, white rats,
English sheep dogs and her favorite
“Woo” (Javanese monkey), colorfully
dressed in brown with bright red and
black trim which she wheeled down
Simcoe Street back of the Parliament
Buildings in an old baby buggy on her
shopping forays.

I can recall vividly her devotion to her

own land and its peoples, which stood
out in everything she said and did.
Life was not easy for Emily Carr, but
she loved it terrifically and lived it in
full. She was an independent, original
thinker of considerable depth, who
expressed an affinity towards the In-
dian people and loved to sit on a cold
afternoon in the old weather-beaten
apartment house on Simcoe Street and

retell stories and anecdotes of humor, .

pathos and understanding, gained dur-
ing the extremely difficult trips she
made up-Coast to explore and paint
their villages and totems.

Victoria at the turn of the century,
and particularly during the ‘‘dirty thir-
ties” offered more discouragement
than support to the artist—morally,
intellectually and financially. And, for
all the acclaim Emily Carr had won
internationally and among Canada’s
leading artists (the Group of Seven)
she was no exception. Miss Carr, as I
knew her, lived in conditions of pover-
ty and deprivation in addition to suf-
fering from real loneliness, no less
than fom the absence of popular recog-
nition of her work, or even helpful
criticism. What a tragedy to have lived
through these creative, difficult years
with a self-image of oneself, as she
wrote, “the little lady on the edge of
nowhere.”

This concept and her isolation from
the “kind patrons of the arts” of that
day, together with the loss of her
mother when she was 15 and her father
two years later, undoubtedly had a
considerable bearing on the two main
themes of her painting — the Indian
forms and the vast rain forests of
Canada’s Pacific province. Undoubtedly
she was attracted to the Indians be-
cause of the way they too were com-
pelled to live outside society whose
demands for conventional decorum she
rejected. She expressed many times
her ability to communicate, to relate
to the early Indians without words.

Describing an early visit to the Uclu-
let chief in 1898, she wrote “The stare
of his eyes searched me right through.
Suddenly they were done . . .” This
searching look of the chief had told

Study in Movement.

Mien

Emily

him (he advised his tribesmen) that she
“had no fear, was not stuck up and
knew how to laugh.” And a pretty ac-
curate thumbnail sketch it was! It was
her ability to laugh, as she always did
when obliged to substitute pantomime
for speech, that earned her Indian
name “Klee Wyck,” laughing one.

Although Emily Carr undoubtedly
found help in freeing her talents and
finding solutions to her problems from
other artists, it is. obvious that she
responded mainly to the spirit of things
and people. “I wish I was better at
talking,” she wrote the Director of the
National Gallery in Ottawa in 1937. “It
is difficult for me. I can’t find what I
want to say in books and copy it out,
because lots of it I don’t believe, lots
of it I don’t understand, and lots don’t
interest me.”

It was her deep concern and unend-
ing drive to express not only what she
saw, but what she felt that stamped
itself on both her paintings and writ-
ings. Her achievements are like those
of all people’s artists, the product of a
life of struggle, hardship, sometimes
of elation and joy, but above all a com-
pelling drive for expression in the bat-
tle for necessities and existence. Emily
Carr was much more of a political
thinker than most of her contemporar-
ies or reviewers are prepared to
acknowledge. Walt Whitman’s poems,
his vigorous social outlook and feeling
for nature, appealed to her to the
point she ‘gleaned from them com-
panionship of kindred spirits.”

One of the greatest impacts and en-
couragements Emily Carr received
came with a trip to the East when she
met the Group of Seven. In the book
“Hundreds and Thousands—The Jour-
nals of Emily Carr’ is recorded the fol-
lowing diary account of that meeting:

“Oh, God, what have I seen? Where
have I been? Something has spoken to
the very soul of me, wonderful,
mighty, not of this world. Chords way
down in my being have been touched.
Dumb. notes have struck chords of
wonderful tone. Something has called
out of somewhere. Something in me is
trying to answer. It is surging through
my whole being, the wonder. of it all,
like a great river rushing on, dark and
turbulent, and rushing irresistibly,
carrying me away on its wild swirl like
a helpless little bundle of wreckage.
Where? Where? Oh, this Group of
Seven, what have they created? — a
world stripped of earthiness, shorn of
fretting details, purged, purified; a
naked soul, pure, unashamed; lovely
spaces filled with wonderful serenity.
... They have been good to me, these
men. Harris (Lawren, who was to be-
come one of Emily’s closest and most
valued lifetime friends) said to me as
he brought out his things, ‘If you see
anything you can suggest, just mention
it, will you?’ Me? ‘I know nothing,’ I
said. ‘You are one of us,’ was his reply.
Oh, how wonderful to think they feel
that! Their works call to my very soul.
Will they know what’s in me by those
old Indian pictures? Have the carps
and frets and. worries that have eaten
into my soul since I returned from
Paris full of ambitions and then had
to struggle out there alone, made me
small and mean, poor and petty—bit-

Carr at Metchosin, B.C., with her caravan, 1936.

ter? They too have had to struggle and
buffet and battle, but they’ve stood to-
gether and the fire in them has burned
steadily. They’re rising above it with
sincerity, bigness and courage. They’ve
forged ahead, helping each other,
and straightening the way.... Surely a
movement that has such men for its
foundation must prevail and live and
become an honored glory to our land.
If I could pray, if I knew where to
find a god to pray to, I would pray,
God Bless ‘the Group of Seven.”

In turn an interesting appraisal of
Emily Carr’s contribution was provided
by Lawren Harris when he wrote on
her death in 1945: “The Pacific Coast
landscape in all its forms and moods is
made for modern expression in paint.
Its fullness, its skies and hills, moun-
tains, islands and headlands have a
plastic amplitude, design and pattern
such as exists in no other part of the
continent. It is another world from all
the land east of the Great Divide.
Emily Carr was the first artist to dis-
cover this. It was primarily this long
and. deepening discovery which made
her work modern and vital, as it was
her love of its moods, mystery and ma-
jesty that gave it the quality of in-
dwelling spirit which the Indians knew
so well. It was her life with the Indians
and their native culture which led her
to share and understand their outlook
on nature and life, and gave her paint-
ings of totems, Indian villages and the
forest a quality and power which no
white person had achieved before.”

Today in- the British Columbia Ar-
chives in Victoria hang 123 pictures by
Emily Carr, in pen, pencil, charcoal,
water-color and. oils—a tribute to one
of Canada’s outstanding artists — for
whom full recognition is yet to come.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1971—PAGE 7