‘Grandness of Canada’ transformed Carr
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
B.C.’s most famous painter launched an art school in Vancouver. It failed — students quit because she smoked, cursed, and it was 1912. Her name now adorns the province’s most prestigious art college.
Although a formally trained professional, her paintings of B.C.’s First Nations culture and the land that shaped them were initially greeted with indifference. A colonial society considered them merely peculiar depictions of the primitive. And so, Carr struggled at the margins for much of her creative life, her challenge to conventions dismissed as eccentricity, notwithstanding recognition of her genius from Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris and her editor Ira Dilworth.
She was born in Victoria on Dec. 13, 1871, the year B.C. joined Confederation, the first in her family to be born in Canada. When her father, a prosperous merchant, built a house a few blocks from where the legislature now stands, the painter recalled that her mother wept at her family — Emily was the eighth of nine children — moving from town into the bush.
Her parents died, but her older sisters sent her to study in San Francisco and London. But after trips — deemed socially inappropriate for a woman — to remote First Nations villages, her artistic vision was transformed by “the grandness of Canada in the raw.” What she experienced, she wrote, was “something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.” People who lived in that landscape found an easy affinity for the woman they came to call Klee Wyck, “Laughing One.” Carr travelled from Vancouver Island to Alaska, Haida Gwaii and up the Skeena River. Her focus shifted from people to their rich art — totem poles, decorated canoes and house fronts. And, then to the wilderness in which they were embedded.
She supported herself by running a boarding house. Her eccentricities — she rode horses astride! — made her an oddity. Ironically, her reputation grew more rapidly from her writing than from her painting — a memoir won the Governor General’s Award in 1941 — but her health declined. She died in 1945, still working. Today, she is compared to Vincent van Gogh. A recent show stunned the British arts establishment. Her paintings sell for as much as $3.9 million, and the home that made her mother cry is a museum.