Student Essay

Marie Péron
This essay was written by an M.A. student in a Museum Practice seminar in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University. The seminar was taught by Dr. Loren Lerner with the assistance of Dina Vescio, a M.A. graduate of the program.

Emily Carr’s Early Documentary Style

Born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871 to parents from England, Emily Carr can be characterized as a daughter “born of the conqueror,” (fig. 1).¹ In stark contrast to her upbringing of English manners and values, Carr’s art and life can be interpreted as a struggle for self-articulation haunted by a complex representation of First Nations cultures. Carr’s interest in the arts of First Nations communities of British Columbia came from her travels to Native villages. Captivated by the carved totems (today, more accurately known as crest poles) she encountered during these travels, Carr depicted them throughout her life – first to document them and later to engage with them on a personal level through painting.

The first of Carr’s travels was to the Nootka Indian mission at Ucluelet on Vancouver Island in 1899. At this time Carr was devoted to accurately recording what she saw. In her determination to document what she believed was a dying culture she made detailed sketches of Native villages, boats, and totem poles. In 1907, Carr again journeyed into what was then considered Indian-country, this time travelling with her sister from Victoria to Alaska. Between 1907 and 1913 approximately 200 paintings that Emily Carr produced, although beautiful and detailed in their rendering, focused on images that “involved the presentation of the ruins rather than the living fabric of First Nations people.”² Her depictions contain images of decaying totem poles, abandoned villages and forests devoid of human presence as exemplified in the 1907 watercolour sketch Totem Walk at Sitka (fig. 2). Although her documentary style aimed to be authentic, the works situated First Nations people as existing in the past. Carr’s approach served to reinforce a colonial fascination with exotic and vanishing cultures. The problems with Carr’s documentary art Marcia Crosby states in her text “Construction of the Imaginary Indian”:

My point is that the “produced authenticity [...] is invisible in Carr’s work, and therein lies the danger. It could be argued that her paintings were authentic or real in the sense that they were ethnographic depictions of actual abandoned villages and rotting poles. However, her paintings of the last poles intimate that the authentic Indians who made them existed only in the past.³

In addition, the supposedly documentary aspects of Carr’s work were used to support the claim that she had a profound understanding of the First Nations cultures she represented which was definitely not the case. Crosby goes on to explain:

If she did forge a deep bond with an imaginary, homogeneous heritage, it was with something that acted as a container for her Eurocentric beliefs, her search for a Canadian identity and her artistic intentions. To accept the myths created about Carr and her relationship with “the Indians” is to accept and perpetuate the myths out of which her work arose.⁴

As beautiful and precise as her depictions may be, with her English background and Canadian upbringing, Carr was a non-native person painting First Nations subjects.

Emily Carr Finds Her Signature Style in France

From 1910 to 1911 Carr lived in France where she continued her art education. At 38, Carr was determined to learn how to express through paint not only what she saw objectively but what she inwardly experienced. She wanted to find ways to freely express through colour and form the rhythms she saw in nature. Carr studied with Scottish artist John Duncan Fergusson who taught her to understand the difference between what she saw and the visual reality of a canvas. Carr left France inspired by the new creative possibilities she saw in painting that would enable her break with her documentary approach and bring more expressive power to her paintings of First Nations forest landscapes.⁵

Returning to Canada in 1911 Carr embarked on her next voyage, this time spending six weeks travelling north from Vancouver to Alert Bay. During this trip Carr made watercolour sketches documenting what she saw but her intention had changed. Her focus was now on reproducing a sense of ambience and light with her brush. In her Vancouver studio she transformed the sketches into colour-rich oil paintings. Following what she learned in France, in particular the use of bright and bold colours typical of Henri Matisse’s paintings, she developed a local colour palette of green, blue, brown and black to reflect the dark solitude of the forest.

In paintings depicting totems such as Graveyard Entrance, Campbell River and The Welcome Man Carr evokes a feeling of atmosphere and illusion of depth and distance by juxtaposing warm colours against cool ones (figs. 3 & 4). In Graveyard Entrance, Campbell River, Carr illuminates the sky directly behind the raven giving it a dramatic effect while guiding the viewer’s eye directly to it. In The Welcome Man, the dark totem in the foreground stands out against the soft yellows of the background to create this sense of depth. In these paintings, Carr captures the colours of the Pacific West Coast as well as her own interpretation of the Native landscape.

The totems and trees of the Pacific West Coast were a personal refuge for Carr. Aware of the unique meanings attached to every totem she represented, Carr writes in a 1913 notebook:

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion… Every pole in my collection has been studied from its own actual reality, in its own original setting, and I have, as you might term it, been personally acquainted with every pole.⁶

Although Carr emphasizes the importance of detail and proportion, it is her personal experience of being ‘acquainted with every pole’ that is particularly significant. Works like The Welcome Man, Graveyard Entrance and a watercolour sketch entitled Cumshewa mark an important progression in Carr’s style from documentation to her own artistic representation (fig. 5). In Cumshewa Carr has applied a vivid array of primary colours of different hues (red, blue, green and yellow) to the forefront of this composition. With the sweeping movements of her brush, she envelops the large lone totem situated at the centre of the composition with a dramatic sky and encroaching undergrowth. As such, the artist appears to suggest the participation of this totem in the great forces of nature. Carr is no longer occupied with depicting the exact detail of each totem pole; rather her focus is on capturing the expressive force of these solemn totems in the forest as she envisioned them.

Emily Carr’s Modern Aesthetic and the Group of Seven

Carr’s formal development took an important turn in the late 1920s around the time that she participated in the 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern organized by the National Gallery of Canada and became acquainted with the Canadian artists known as the Group of Seven. Already interested in modernist aesthetics, Carr was impressed by “their idealized forms, the suppression of detail, the use of directional lights shafts and austere geometric underpinnings.”⁷ Continuing to paint dark totems in illuminated backgrounds as in earlier works like the Welcome Man, Carr would incorporate elements of the modernist aesthetic into her distinct style. This is seen in her use of the directional light shafts in the 1930 painting Totems (fig. 6).

Voicing her ideas in a 1930 speech, Carr stated that the beauty of modern art:

lay in building a structural, unified, beautiful whole – an enveloping idea – a spiritual unity. [This beauty] required a felt experience in nature, forgetting the individual objects, and abandoning visual accuracy for its own sake. The result, which might lead as far as abstraction, [is] art in which only the spiritual remains.⁸

While as Crosby argues it is important to comprehend the context of Carr’s representation of totem poles, her depictions demonstrate the artistic growth and personal style that she strived for as a modern artist.

LIST OF FIGURES

fig. 1 Emily Carr, photograph (Photo: H-02811 Royal BC Museum, British Columbia Archives (Photo: {http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/cgi-bin/www2i/.visual/img_med/dir_105/b_04237.gif})

fig. 2 Emily Carr, Totem Walk at Sitka, 1907, watercolour on paper, 38.5 x 38.5 cm, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Thomas Gardiner Keir bequest 1994.055.004). (Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery, Virtual Museum Canada {http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/EmilyCarr/en/about/ early_work.php})

fig. 3 Emily Carr, Graveyard Entrance, Campbell River, 1912, oil on canvas, 77.7 x 53 cm, National Gallery of Canada (bequest of Alan and Marion Gibbons, 2007). (Photo: Cybermuse {http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=105974})

fig. 4 Emily Carr, The Welcome Man, 1913, oil on cardboard, mounted on masonite, 95.3 x 64.8 cm, National Gallery of Canada (gift of Bryan Adams, Dec. 2000). (Photo: Cybermuse {http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_e.jsp?mkey=96805})

fig. 5 Emily Carr, Cumshewa, 1912, watercolour and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard, 52.0 cm x 75.5 cm, National Gallery of Canada. (Photo: Cybermuse {http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=3584)

fig. 6 Emily Carr, Totems, 1930, oil on canvas, 130.7 x 86.1 cm, National Gallery of Canada. (Photo: Cybermuse {http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=3291})

NOTES

1. Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones, “Two Dreamtimes: Representation of Indigeneity in the Work of Australian Poet Judith Wright and Canadian Artist Emily Carr,” KUNAPIPI: Journal of Postcolonial Writing 26:2 (2004): 105.
2. Scott Watson, “Disfigured Nature: The Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape,” Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) 217.
3. Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) 220.
4. Crosby, 220.
5. Vancouver Art Gallery, “About Emily Carr: France (1910-1911),” Virtual Museum Canada, Exhibitions: Emily Carr {http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/EmilyCarr/en/about/france.php}.
6. Emily Carr, qtd. in Crosby, 221.
7. Vancouver Art Gallery, Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996) 28.
8. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 252.