from now on, she would concentrate on teaching children, who were easier to get along with.
Children taking classes from Miss Emily Carr at 570 Granville Street ran up the marble stairs to the second floor, past the Men’s Conservative Club and into a studio jammed with tables, easels, flowers, and animals. From one corner might come the tantalizing squeak of chipmunks and squirrels, busy building nests. The masked raccoons could be daintily washing their dinner while Jane the parrot and Sally the cockatoo screeched happily over the din. In the middle of it all, Billie the English sheepdog curled like a warm white rug for any child who needed a moment of quiet snuggling before returning to the fun of sketching a nursery rhyme or painting one of the bright bouquets at the window. Sometimes Miss Carr released the two white rats to play on the table. Then everyone grabbed their bread-erasers to save them from becoming a rat’s dinner. There was always tea, and snacks, and laughter.
On warm days she paraded her little company through the hallway, down the stairs, and along Georgia Street to the Vancouver wharves or to Stanley Park to sketch. Each child carried a camp stool and easel, and one held die basket from which Sally the cockatoo happily screeched, “Sally is a Sally! Sally is a Sally!”
When she wasn’t teaching, Emily worked on her own paintings, but her favourite activity was to lose herself and Billie on one of the many paths that threaded through the densely treed Stanley Park. She especially loved the solitude of a grove of seven huge cedars called the Seven Sisters. Although she no longer went to church regularly (“God got so stuffy squeezed into a church,” she once said) she was finding her holiness outside.
One day there was a knock at her studio door. She opened it to find a slim, barefooted woman about thirty years old with a baby on her back and two small children beside her. Sophie Frank was a Coast Salish woman who sold her handwoven baskets door to door. Emily especially liked one but she hadn’t enough money to buy it. Sophie offered to exchange it for used clothes the next time Emily came back from Victoria. In the meantime, she left the basket.
Emily was moved by the native woman’s trust in her. When she brought back a collection of used clothes that Sophie found acceptable, the two women began a lifelong friendship. Whenever Emily lived in Vancouver, Sophie dropped by for tea. And when Emily felt lonely she visited Sophie in her village on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. She would take the ferry across Burrard Inlet and the two women would visit in Sophie’s three-room house beside the Catholic Mission. In spite of Emily’s poor Chinook and Sophie’s broken English, they laughed easily together. Often there was a new baby to play with. Sometimes they sat silently on the church steps, watching the ferry cross to the North Shore, the canoes out fishing, and the children playing on the beach.
Sometimes Sophie put on her best skirt of plaid and black velvet and tied a yellow scarf around her head, and they would visit the graveyard with its collection of tiny gravestones belonging to Sophie’s many dead babies. One of them was named after Emily. Then they might walk to the church where Emily, although she was not Catholic, had the priest’s permission to cross herself with holy water and kneel with Sophie in front of the candles burning on the altar.
A portrait of Sophie hung in Emily’s studio. “There is a bond between us,” Emily said, “where color, creed, environment don’t count. The woman in us meets on Emily Carr_common ground and we love each other.”3 They remained friends until Sophie’s death in 1939.
The other way Emily eased her loneliness was by spending weekends with her sisters in Victoria. As long as they stayed at a certain distance from each other, they all seemed to get along.
In 1907, Emily and Alice took the Alaskan cruise on which Emily first saw the totem poles of Alert Bay and Sitka. It was on this trip that she decided to paint what she saw as the vanishing heritage of British Columbia’s First Nations.
The next summer and again in 1909 as soon as school ended, she boarded a steamship and, with Billie for company, sailed up the coast of Vancouver Island to Alert Bay, Campbell River, and to other Kwakwaka’wakw settlements that had a strong tradition of carving.4 On the mainland she travelled to Sechelt, Hope, Yale, and Lytton. She painted the large native community houses with their dramatic faces and the totem poles, always trying to be as precise and photographic as possible, because, she felt, she was working “for history.” By this time Emily was signing her paintings, “M. Emily Carr” or “M. Carr” or “M.E. Carr” to carefully distinguish herself from the other “E. Carrs,” Edith and Elizabeth. Toward the end of her career her paintings were usually signed simply, “Emily Carr.” By then there was no doubt, there was only one.
In 1908 Emily was a founding member of the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts, but many of the artists there found her abrasive and hard to get along with. In fact, she was beginning to get a reputation as being a bit odd. She didn’t seem to care what people thought of her – or rather, she defied people to think whatever they liked. For Vancouverites, this was probably her greatest sin. Once, when a student caught her scrubbing her studio floor dressed in her bathing suit, Emily only laughed. People found it strange that she was always surrounded by animals.
And then there was her subject matter. Other artists had painted native villages before, but Miss Carr, they said, actually lived with the Indians while she painted them! Emily, who liked to shock, didn’t object to any of the growing talk about her. Most Indians seemed to accept her more easily than white people did, and she was always happier in small villages and in the forest than in big cities.
Vancouver art critics praised her work, but Emily wasn’t happy with it. She knew she had much more to learn. She had been to London. Now, she decided, she had saved enough money from her teaching to go to Paris where the “real” art was taking place. Alice would go with her as her translator. They arrived in Paris in August, 1910.
3 . Paula Blanchard, The Life of Emily Carr, p. 108.
4 . At the time, the people there were called Kwakiutl, which is the anglicized form of Kwakwaka’wakw, pronounced Kwak-WAK-ya-wak.
6
Finding color
I tramped the country-side, sketch sack on shoulder. The fields were lovely, lying like a spread of gay patchwork against red-gold wheat, cool, pale oats, red-purple of new-turned soil, green, green grass, and orderly, well-trimmed trees.
– Emily Carr, Growing Pains
As soon as they settled in their flat in Montparnasse, Emily and Alice went to see the man to whom Emily had been given a letter of introduction. His name was Harry Gibb. At first Emily was shocked when he showed her his “modern” paintings. Alice couldn’t even bear to look. The figures weren’t realistic but distorted – and they pulsed with wild, unnatural colour. This was the “New Art” that everyone either loved or hated, and it was what Emily had come to find.
My Bed, Somewhere in France. Emily is fascinated by the New Art she learns in France, particularly its use of bold colour, surging rhythm, and distorted perspective to convey emotion.
After the first shock, she found the pictures exciting. They made traditional art look dull and unconvincing. She wanted to know how she too, could paint in this style. Gibb recommended the Académie Colarossi where Whistler, Rodin, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani, and Matisse had all studied and where male and female students could work together. At many schools, this was unacceptable, but Gibb thought Emily would benefit from working beside what he called “the stronger work of men.” Emily had found another reluctant mentor who