by SCOTT WATSON
Director of the Morris and Belkin Art Gallery, UBC

Even though the literature on Emily Carr (1871-1945) continues to grow she remains a misunderstood figure. Her own journals tell us how misunderstood and isolated she felt. Even after she achieved national fame she hung onto the idea that her society was hostile to her painting. Almost fifty years after her death her stature as a painter is not a settled issue. There is little doubt that she has a place in the pantheon of Canadian modernism where she is considered the equal and perhaps better than the best of the Group of Seven (depending where you are from). However, she has yet to secure her place in twentieth century art history at large, alongside, say Georgia O'Keefe or Frida Kahlo, despite decades of lobbying by Canadian curators and scholars and despite the success of feminist interventions in the rewriting of art history.

We mythologize our own west-coast identity around her story. We think she is heroic, but largely for confronting the provincialism we paradoxically indulge in when we tell her story. She felt very rooted in British Columbia and had an intense rapport with our forests, waters and skies. She researched First Nations art and incorporated it into her own work. She didn't like travelling and hated big cities. Her sense of belonging and rootedness was intense (we know this from her writing). She was born here but as an advanced painter she was quite out of place. Her feeling of belonging and at the same time feeling out of place characterizes the colonial state of mind. Today we think we are outgrowing this insecure state of mind but we still call our province British Columbia.

Emily Carr is famous for four main groups of paintings and for the books she wrote in the last years of her life. An avid student, Carr went to art schools in San Francisco and England. But her moment of conversion came when she studied in Paris at the age of thirty (1910-11). There she encountered modern painting and became a Fauve, taking up their bright, unmixed colours. These paintings were the most advanced paintings made by a Canadian artist up to that time. Her work was shown in prestigious exhibitions. A European career seemingly lay before her, but she chose to return to the very unsophisticated city of her birth.

Besides the modernist paintings, her other great early works were the result of travels she took to Northern British Columbia between 1906 and 1910 and again in 1912. She resolved to document First Nations monumental art and architecture. While engaged with First Nations art

she became convinced of its importance and of the necessity of learning from it to create a Canadian art independent from the model of Europe. On her own and several years before the Group of Seven came together, she became the first modern Canadian painter of Canadian subject matter.

The years between Paris, her studies of native communities, and her "discovery" in 1927 were unproductive and, one gathers, unhappy. She became known in Victoria not as an artist but as a colourful crackpot who kept pet monkeys. But when she was included in an important National Gallery Canada exhibition in 1927 and came to the attention of the Canadian art world, Lawren Harris in particular, she bloomed. It is extraordinary to realize that almost all her great work and all the paintings of rain forests and skies that characterize her most in our imagination were painted after she had turned fifty-six.

Her mature works are of roughly two kinds. In the late twenties and early thirties she created ambitious oil paintings that attempted to create a style that would combine European modernism and native art. The best of these depict the shapes of the forest and land metamorphosing into her cubist version of native design. Her last works are oil paintings on paper. These sing with energy and life.

The mature works celebrate the renewing forces of nature. We don't so often discuss the important admonitory sub-themes; the ravages of the forest industry, the decay of all man-made structures and the sexual anguish to be found in the twisted roots of beached stumps.

Despite her familiarity to us, Carr remains enigmatic. Apparently not very intellectual or even sophisticated, she sacrificed every normal happiness to turn herself into the most advanced Canadian painter of her day, a role she was temperamentally ill suited to. We will never know what motivated such an outpouring of determination. However we do know the results of that struggle: her paintings. These art forms serve as the mediums through which Carr's life experiences and life struggles can continue to speak to us even though the artist herself is now gone.