Max Maynard, Jack Shadbolt (later one of Canada’s leading painters), and John McDonald all liked to come to her studio, see her latest work, and talk about art. All three thought her work some of the best in the province and acknowledged her influence on their own art.
But their easy male confidence intimidated her. Emily was always uncomfortable with art criticism, and as the men talked – “spouting jargon” as she called it – she felt more and more stupid. She became increasingly abrupt with them. When she saw signs of her influence in their work, rather than take it as a compliment (young artists modelling on an older one), she was sure they were stealing her ideas.
Part of her defensiveness may have had to do with arrogance on their part. Maynard once told her women can’t paint. Emily, he quickly explained, was an exception. But Emily had heard too much of this sort of talk before. When the men moved to Vancouver, she found it easier to be friendly from a distance.
Always, if Emily felt under attack, she snapped back. She could be a good friend, but she lost her temper easily – and was often sorry after. In her fear of being rejected, she rejected others first, before they could reject her – or her work. The one artist with whom she was close at this time was Edythe Hembroff. They met when Emily read in the newspaper that Edythe had just come back from studying art in France, and invited her to tea. The two were different in many ways but they liked each other immediately, and for three years they painted together almost every day.
During the early 1930s Emily became distanced from the members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because of her own sharp temper and her quickness to feel slighted, but partly also it was her increasing confidence in her own work.
Officially, the Group had dissolved and formed a larger organization, the Canadian Group of Painters, of which Emily was a charter member. In 1933 when she sent sixteen of her new paint and paper sketches east for their comments, Emily was disappointed in their feedback. She thought the freshness and courage of their earlier painting was gone and that none of them had changed their style, while Emilys continued to develop. For years she had been dependent on their criticisms but soon she would write in her journal, “Now they are torn away and I stand alone,” (“alone” was underlined), “on my own perfectly good feet. Now I take my own soul as my critic.”
She even suffered a cooling (though never an end) to her relationship with Lawren Harris. When Bess Housser and Lawren Harris announced their plan to divorce their spouses and marry each other, Emily was deeply offended. She always held conservative sexual attitudes and although she liked them both, she felt she couldn’t trust them again. Harris continued to write to Emily, and (after 1940, when he and Bess moved to Vancouver,) to visit her, but their relationship was never the same.
This was partly because Emily was beginning to see some of the differences between Harris’s work and goals and her own. His paintings, she thought, were too cold, too finished, almost static. “They take you to their destination and leave you,” she said. In her own work, movement was now all-important. She was trying to make her paintings express the heat of “growing, not stopping, being still on the move.”
But she never stopped acknowledging his importance to her. Just before her death she wrote of him that his “work and example did more to influence my outlook upon art than any school or any master.”
Emily was developing a new style, one in which rhythm was dominant. Perhaps as a reflection of her growing spiritual confidence in the “continuous process of life, eternally changing,” her paintings lighten. Space is no longer heavily carved but moves. In 1930 in New York she had seen Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit series of paintings. Now, in the canvas, Tree, Emily, like O’Keeffe, focuses the viewer in tight, to a single aspect of the tree, emphasizing the grace of its rising trunk with only a glimpse of green draperies falling around it. This painting also shares the feeling of inner tension of the totem poles. When describing forest, she exclaimed how it affected her, “surging with being, palpitating with overpowering, terrific life, life, life.” Emily also began to look above the trees to the sky, which she sought to make “roomy and moving and mysterious.” She still painted totem poles – mostly from older sketches – but this work, too, showed a new confidence, a new rhythm, as if she was now seeing the totem poles through her own eyes.
Until now, her sketching trips around Victoria had been limited by where she could find a cabin to rent, but in 1933 she solved that problem. Ever since she was a child reading stories about the gypsies or Roma people, she had dreamed of owning a caravan. Now, with the proceeds from the sale of one of her paintings, she bought a rickety trailer, dubbed it “the Elephant,” and built in it a bed for herself, sleeping spaces for the animals, a meat safe, kerosene stove, and bookshelves. She also built a large canvas tarpaulin on one side where she could cook and heat the water for her hot water bottle on rainy days.
Now every spring and fall Emily had the Elephant towed to some place near Victoria where she spent several weeks sketching. She felt, she said, like “Mrs. Noah” with all her creatures – including Woo the monkey, happily ensconced in a tree, and Susie the rat, tucked into a corner in her oatmeal container.
Susie travelled everywhere with Emily, partly because no one else could stand her. Lizzie and Alice had finally come to accept Woo, the monkey, even though she once kept Alice cornered for hours in the back shed. But a rat was a rat, and the sisters wouldn’t have it near them. So Susie stayed in the oatmeal carton or kept Emily company inside the collar of her jacket as Emily sketched. The animal was so devoted that she wouldn’t leave, even if the Elephant’s door was left open. In Victoria, if her cage in the studio was not securely locked at night, she’d struggle up the steep studio stairs to sleep on Emily’s pillow.
The first time Emily lumbered out in the Elephant was in the late summer of 1933, back to Goldstream Flats. She confided to her journal how on most nights, when everyone else was in bed, she put on a “nondescript garment” and lay down on the stones in the river for her bath and let the water ripple over her sixty-two-year-old skin. When she was “scrubbed down with a hard brush” and back in bed with a hot water bottle, she felt “like a million dollars” with everyone peacefully asleep and the trees and river whispering around her. Outdoors was always where she felt happiest.
It was on these trips in the Elephant that Emily finally found a way to express the moving spirit she had been seeking in nature. She had a dream in which she saw an ordinary wooded hillside suddenly come alive, “weighted with sap, burning green in every leaf.” After that, she said, “growing green” became something different to her.
For the next few years, in paintings such as Above the Gravel Pit, Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky, and Sky, all the elements of her painting came together to show flow and rhythm, what she called the “organized chaos of growth.” She had come to terms with her fear and was painting her own vision. When the weather was bad or if she wasn’t in the mood to sketch, she wrote stories. “These were the happiest days of my life,” she later said.
Lawren Harris now urged her to take the next step and move into the purely abstract, as he had done, away from the representation of actual objects and into a landscape of curves and cones. But Emily held back. Though she was very interested, she wasn’t entirely sure what Harris meant when he talked to her of “abstraction” in art. She knew that when she looked at his work she was moved. She was afraid that if she left forest images, her own work would be merely decorative. Instead, she “clung to earth…her density, her herbage, her juice” and continued to paint the familiar, identifiable forest.
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