Emily Carr (1871–1945) has been called the Van Gogh of Canada. Like him, she struggled all her life, first to obtain art training, then later, to win the praise of critics and buyers. Born in Victoria, British, Columbia, much of her work featured landscapes and cultural scenes from the region. She visited indigenous communities on the west side of Vancouver Island, and later, in Alaska. These experiences profoundly affected her paintings, as did a trip across Canada and to Europe with her sister in 1910.
Carr studied art in San Francisco, London, and France. Influenced by the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists, her work was bold, colorful, and ahead of its time. After meeting rejection for her paintings, she stopped working and kept a boarding house and raised dogs, living in straightened circumstances. In the late twenties, she began to receive greater attention in Canada, when she was accepted into the Group of Seven, with a first solo show in 1935 in Toronto, followed by shows in Europe.
Her writings, most in the form of journals, explore nature, her artistic progress, her spirituality, and the minutiae of everyday life. Her first book Klee Wyke was published in 1941. The Book of Small in 1942, The House of All Sorts in 1944. Four more were published posthumously. These include Growing Pains (1946), Pause (1953), The Heart of a Peacock 1953, and Hundreds and Thousands (1966).
The following excerpt is taken from the chapter “The Elephant” from Hundreds and Thousands. The Elephant was what she named the caravan she camped in with her menagerie of pets including four dogs, a monkey, and a rat.
September 7th, 1931
The woods were in a quiet mood, dreamy and sweet. No great contrasts of light and dark but full of quiet flowing light and fresh from recent rain, and the growth full, steady, and ascending. Whitman’s “Still Midnight”—“This is thine hour. O soul, thy free flight into wordless”—sang in my heart. I’ve a notion, imagination perhaps, that if you are slightly off focus, you vision the spiritual a little clearer. Perhaps it is that one is striving for something a bit beyond one’s reach, an illusive something that can scarcely bear human handling, that the “material we” scarcely dare touch. It is too bright and vague to look straight at; the brutality of a direct look drives it away half imagined, half seen. It is something that lies, as Whitman says, in that far off inaccessible region where neither ground is for feet nor path to follow.
I do not say to myself, I will do thus or so. I leave myself open to leads, doing just what I see to do at the moment, neither planning nor knowing but quietly waiting for God and my soul.
from Hundreds and Thousands, The Emily Carr Omnibus p. 691
Learn more about Emily Carr
Almost all her writings can be found in the Emily Carr Omnibus 1993. Or can be purchased individually.
Growing Pains by Emily Carr is her autobiography
Emily Carr National Gallery of Canada
Emily Carr’s Artistic Celebration of the First Nations
From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia by Sarah Milroy (ed) and Ian Dejardin (ed) [biography]
View her artwork
Emily Carr: A Collection of 196 Works
Emily Carr: Collected by Ian M. Thorn (ed) [book]
Direction, that’s what I am after, everything moving together, relative movement, sympathetic movement, connected movement, flowing, liquid, universal movement, all directions summing up one grand direction, leading the eye forward, and satisfying.
Emily Carr
Hundreds and Thousands
I found the artwork of Emily Carr by accident on a trip to Vancouver. I did not know of her writings in of her struggle. So grateful you have found her and alerted me and all other readers to her work. Once again, thank you, Joan!