Emily Carr, Black Mountain
Fifty-six years ago tonight there was a big storm out West and deep snow. My dear little Mother wrestled bravely and I was born and the storm has never quite lulled in my life. I’ve always been tossing and wrestling and buffeting it. How little I’ve accomplished! And the precious years are flying by and never, never one minute will the clock tick backwards.
--Emily Carr
In January I read Hundreds and Thousands, the journals of the iconic Canadian landscape painter and writer Emily Carr (1871-1945). The book was given to me by an old friend who saw an affinity between my own struggles and musings -- known to him from this blog and our conversations that began back when we were eighteen -- and Carr's internal dialogue set down so vividly in her clear prose.
The journals begin in the mid-1920s, when Carr is in her fifties, trying to break through into a new way of expressing the landscape and what she feels about nature. She was essentially a recluse who lived with a menagerie of animals, including a rat and a monkey, and spent much of each summer camping and painting in the Pacific Northwest in a caravan she dubbed "The Elephant." She was as crusty, abrasive, and impatient as she was intelligent, sensitive, and determined; loyal to her sisters continually fail to understand her; loyal too, but annoyed by the rituals, hierarchy and dogma of the Anglican Church, which seemed so removed from her own sense of an unknowable, loving God permeating all of creation.
My friend was right: I read with an immediate sense of empathy, recognition, gratitude. They're as necessary to me as the living, these dear dead friends met in books, or felt in the brushwork of a painting or a vibrant line in a drawing, for sometimes it's so hard to explain ourselves to the real-life people who stop by the studio or read our scribblings, as Emily called her journals and stories.
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In 1929, Carr came to Montreal -- a rare visit to the East -- encountering the work of the Group of Seven for the first time and becoming particularly enamored with the paintings of Lawren Harris:
Lawren Harris, "Mountain Forms." He painted a number of variations of this subject and from her description I don't think this the exact one Carr saw in Montreal.
Harris's 'Mountain Forms' was beautiful. It occupied the centre of one wall – one great cone filled with snow and serenely rising to a sky filled with wonderful light round it in halo-like circles. Forms purplish in colour lead up to it. He gets a strip of glorious cold green in the foreground and the whole sky is sublimely serene.
I sat and watched it for a long, long time. I wished I could sweep the rest of the wall bare. The other pictures jarred. Two fashionable women came in and called others. They laughed and scoffed. After wondering if the thing was an angel cake, they consulted the catalogue. It is 'Mountain Forms.' " They all laughed. How I longed to slap them! Others came and passed without giving more than a brief, withering glance. A priest came. Surely he would understand. Wouldn't the spirituality of the thing appeal to one whose life was supposed to be given to these things? He passed right by even though he walked twice through the room – blind, blind!
Soon she met Harris, and spent a long time at his studio.
...I wonder if he [Lawren Harris] realizes how I appreciate his generosity and what the day meant to me in trying to solve the riddles and mysteries that I’ve plugged along with alone for so long. Of this I am convinced: that he has come up to where he now is by diligent, intelligent grinding and wrestling and digging things out; that he couldn’t do what he is doing now without doing what he has already done; that his religion, whatever it is, and his painting are one and the same. I wonder where he'll rise to. In eight years his work has changed entirely. In eight years more what will happen to it?
They became friends, corresponding by letter for many years. Eventually Carr parted ways with Harris and The Group of Seven, who were Theosophists, and had a view of God as cold and remote that she simply couldn't share.
I loved reading about Carr's working life, both in general terms and when she talks about the gestation and progress of a particular painting or drawing. We share a great deal about our feelings for place, landscape, spirituality, and identity. But I'm especially moved when she writes about the swift passage of time, about getting older and more tired, and still pressing on toward the elusive goal of expressing the inexpressible, the truth as she sees it. For that's the challenge, I think, of this stage in life: finding a way to keep going with courage and happiness and determination, even when age begins to affect our physical body and the acquisitive desires of youth and middle age are seen clearly and set aside, whether with disappointment and discouragement, or relief. It would be so much easier to simply retirer, to use the French word from which we get both "retire", and "retreat:" many do. But for the artist, I don't think this is an option, so we have to dig down deep, and enter the solitude where we -- paradoxically -- sometimes find staunchest companions.
The Mountain, Emily Carr, 1933
