Emily Carr (14 page)

A strong mystical tendency existed in the Group of Seven, but this was de-emphasized or obscured by the nationalist program. They used terms such as “the spirit of the landscape” freely, but there was little analysis of exactly what that spirit was. Even today, nature is seen as a place for
healthy exercise, such as hiking, or as a place to think about ecology. Awe, terror, and rapture are not mentioned.

Theosophy was not a religion, a philosophy, a cult, or a church. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by a Russian, Helena Blavatsky. After she had travelled in various countries, she developed what could best be described as a synthesis of religious and mystical thinking in order to arrive at a way of understanding the divine and achieving spiritual wisdom. By the 1880s the Society had become an international organization with branches in India, across Europe, and in Canada and the United States. It drew on Buddhism and Hinduism, traditional Western religions, and on more esoteric traditions. Independent religions were something of a phenomenon in the late 1800s, and many of them were of the most dubious kind. Theosophy, too, had some precepts that verged on hocus-pocus, but then, so do the established religions.

As it affected Emily, theosophy is relevant only because of Lawren Harris, and the way he translated some of its suggestions into his art and encouraged her to do the same. The essence of what Emily took from Harris and theosophy can be summed up in the idea that through contact with nature we can experience the animating principle that governs the universe. The artist can articulate that principle.
For a time, Carr tried to adapt her thinking to the principles of theosophy, but eventually rejected it, not without feeling some guilt that she was betraying Harris.

Yet she longed for connection, and for a way to express that connection, for a way to find a new god, or the old gods. She rejected orthodox Christianity and theosophy, needing no doctrine, or finding none that corresponded to her own experience. In the totem poles, Emily saw a total expression of Native cosmology. It came out of their society, which was part of the landscape and the forest. Emily saw it as art that expressed the West Coast landscape. If we see a Greek sculpture, we might not know which god or hero it represents, but we can still respond to the sculptor's depiction of a human being. In the same way, Emily responded to a depiction not of a culture, of which she remained somewhat ignorant, but to the way that culture expressed itself. Through it, she could discover and articulate what she had only felt before.

The forest can be mysterious, sinister, inhospitable, and unknown. It occupies a powerful place in our consciousness, hovering there with a primal intensity. In Emily's day there was no poetry, no painting, no music, and no literature through which to approach this unknown. The anonymous carvers of the totem poles led Emily toward the shadows, and in them, she found a way to the light. “The power that
I felt was not in the thing itself,” she noted in her journal, “but in some tremendous force behind it.”

In the 1930s Emily began to attend church again, as well as all sorts of lectures dealing with spirituality. She even invited one speaker home and showed him her paintings. Her thoughts were directed very much to expressing her religious feelings in her painting. In her journals from this period, the word “God” is repeated a great many times, and always linked with nature. When she talks of God she uses the language of Christianity, but it was a god that was a result of a personal approach. As she stated in her private notebook, “God in all. Always looking for the face of God, always listening for the voice of God in Nature. Nature is God revealing himself, expressing his wonders and his love. Nature clothed in God's beauty of holiness.” Emily herself said that churchgoers might have thought of her as outside the Church, and she preferred to visit empty churches, but she was religious and always had been. The forest became her church. In some paintings, the trunks of the trees are reminiscent of the pillars inside a cathedral, and the shafts of light are like those that fall through the windows of a church.

Painting from nature became a form of meditation and prayer, a way of communing with and being part of the
divine spirit that is the universe. The act of painting had itself become an act of worship. In her journal, Emily described her method of approaching nature:

Sit quietly and silently acknowledge your divinity and oneness with the creator of all things. Enter the silence and feel yourself pivoting on the one source and Substance God. When you are permeated with this feeling of oneness with the creator regard that which is before you till some particular phase of it arrests your attention and then form your Ideal, thinking deeply into it, seeing God in all, drawing the holiness of his Idea to you and absorbing it till you become one with it, and at home with your subject. Rely on your intuition, which is the voice of God to lead you and tell you step by step how to proceed. The working will come through the Spirit.

In nature she saw the underlying life force that is in everything. Her paintings communicate that same intensity, mystery, and awe she had experienced when looking at the totem poles or sitting in the woods. She painted not as an observer, but from the inside—inside the forest and inside herself. Whatever mystical notions she projected onto the
landscape, they were not mere romanticism, for she was aware of the biological forces at work in nature, and saw them as evidence of the pulsing life that is in everything. “Though everything was so still, you were aware of tremendous forces of growth pounding through the clearing, aware of sap gushing in every leave, of push, push, push, the bursting of buds; the creeping of vines. Everything expanding every minute.”

She infuses her work with the intensity of her religious feelings. There are no habitations, no animals, no humans in the paintings now, just nature, pure, essential, almost abstract. It was life, but outside the human context.

All her life she had sought the god spirit—to find it, to show it, and to be in it. Some painters work for praise and riches. And some work for something that most of us are unaware of until the artist brings it to our attention. Like the great religious painters of the past, she painted neither for fame nor glory, but for God.

Her spiritual yearnings found a form of expression in her paintings. Art and religion coincided. Art was the act and the symbol of the spiritual meaning she had found. The painting was not only the means but also the expression, a visual manifestation. Her final paintings have an ecstatic rapture to them that is almost unrivalled in art.

Emily's mystical quest develops in a complex, circuitous path. She begins with youthful churchgoing, and then the Native encounter, followed by Harris and theosophy, a return to the Church, a journey deeper into the forest where she paints in a new way, and then the final synthesis of it all into ecstatic rapture.

Two of Emily's most frequently reproduced paintings can serve as an illustration of her mystical development. They are
Indian Church
(1929) and
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky
(1935). In the first, a simplified white church is dwarfed by the looming sculptural forms of the surrounding forest. There is something a little sentimental and obvious in it, and yet it speaks to so many people as an image, not only of a habitation in the vastness of nature, but also of the human in the universal.

In the second painting, completed just six years later, a tall, thin tree trunk shoots up from a strip of land at the bottom of the picture into a sky of radiating light. The emotional and symbolic content affects us in an almost physical manner. The power of the painting is undeniable. It is beyond design and decoration; no longer a depiction of something that is meant to represent rapture, it is rapture, the very embodiment and expression of ecstatic liberation.

A note to herself in her diary serves as eloquent advice on how we might also approach her paintings:

A picture is not a collection of portrayed objects nor is it a certain effect of light and shade nor is it a souvenir of a place nor a sentimental reminder, nor is it a show of colour nor a magnificence of form, nor yet is it anything seeable or sayable. It is a glimpse of God interpreted by the soul.

Is it better to have a happy life than to achieve great things? Would Emily Carr have been happier if she had chosen another path? There was never any doubt in most people's minds that Emily Carr was a genuine and original artist. Whether her work was accepted or not, it was recognized as the real thing. It was her tragedy and her gift to be compelled to make art.

Success and failure are both relative. A poet once stated that there was no success like failure, and failure was no success at all. Emily would have understood the paradox in that statement, and the irony. She was a woman of many contradictions. Her life can be seen as a series of apparent failures, yet each failure also contained within it the elements of success. She was a success because she was a failure.

When, after five years of study in England, she returned to Canada without having established herself as
an artist and without having developed a personal style, she thought of herself as a failure. Yet her experience as a colonial in the motherland, alienated by a culture in which she could find no part, deepened her identification with the West Coast and gave her a stronger sense of belonging.

After Emily returned from France, her exhibition of paintings in the new style met with little success. Rather than give up and resume an acceptable way of painting, she determined to develop and adapt that new style to the landscape she knew.

If we measure a woman's success in life—as her society did—by her prosperous husband, her enviable house, her talented and beautiful children, and her elevated status in the hierarchy of society, then Emily Carr was a failure. But the choices she made also gave her the freedom to live and think independently.

The attempt to make a historical record of totem poles failed when the provincial government rejected her project and declined to fund it. Yet now we look to her paintings of totem poles as one of the few records that do exist. Furthermore, she eventually rejected the role of ethnographer and discovered something much more important in Native art—a religious identification with nature.

The lack of sales and acclaim for most of her career made her realize that fame and fortune are not the point of making art. And her isolation from the mainstream of art forced her to rely on her own inner convictions and to develop an originality that was earned and that places her above her peers in both achievement and artistic integrity.

At the end, her body failed her, with illness and old age. But by then she had achieved a serenity and a mystical sense of transcendence beyond the physical. And, finally, through the legacy of the paintings she left to the world, she achieved immortality.

The greatest success in life is how we engage with the world, how we live. It can be said of Emily Carr that she embraced life with desire, courage, determination, and passion. And that is the best kind of success.

There is a story often told that goes something like this:

The heroine leaves home for unknown regions in search of a special goal or object. After many setbacks and difficult encounters, and with the aid of benevolent helpers at crucial moments along the way, she reaches her destination and finds what she is seeking. But, in doing so, she discovers the true meaning of the quest, which was not a place or an object, but an inner goal.

Most of the world's cultures have in their mythology some version of this quest narrative, whether it is in Homer's
Odyssey
from ancient Greece, medieval knights in their search for the Holy Grail, or a story as contemporary as
The Wizard of Oz
or
The Lord of the Rings
. The quest stories are essentially tales of personal transformation and can be interpreted as a metaphor for an individual's journey through life. The ultimate goal is not success or achievement, but the getting of wisdom.

The journey is always a long and arduous one, sometimes lasting a lifetime. Travel to distant and unknown places is
always involved. Opponents and situations arise to block the path and challenge the heroine. There are dangers and setbacks. Sometimes the quest is abandoned temporarily when the heroine gives up and retreats. Sacrifice is always involved and courage is essential.

Emily Carr's life reads as one of these quest stories. The naïve young girl leaves home with only one ambition, to be an artist, but she does not yet understand the true meaning of art. She completes one task, to study in San Francisco, but finds it is not enough, and sets off again, this time for England. There she encounters prejudice, loneliness, and isolation. She must also sacrifice the hope of love. A setback comes in the form of illness that temporarily ends her quest. Once recovered, she journeys to France, and finds success when she develops a new painting style and has two of her pictures shown at the Salon. But the success brings no immediate benefit. The goal has not yet been achieved.

Then the journey takes her into the deep forest, where she encounters a world that is different and mysterious. She begins to develop as an artist, yet the world turns away from what she offers. She gives up the fight, having sacrificed personal happiness and her youth for an unattainable goal. The years of retreat follow.

The benevolent helper appears in the form of Lawren Harris. Like the wizards of old, he gives her the key, by indicating where the path might lie. Once more, she journeys into the forest. She thinks she has found her goal at last, in the totem pole paintings, which now bring her recognition and acceptance. But the totem poles are only signposts. She goes beyond them, into the true mystery, and it is there, in her spiritual transformation, that the journey reaches its conclusion.