Adapted from:
Weiselberber, Carl. "Artist Recalls Sketch Trips with Emily Carr".
Ottawa Citizen. November 2, 1961.
By Carl Weiselberger
"I hate having people about," said Emily Carr, the now famous Canadian painter, to a young art student who wanted to follow her to sketching camp -- and finally succeeded.
The young art student was Edythe Hembroff, now Mrs. Julius F. Schleicher, who recently quit her 14-year-old job as a government translator, to return to her native Victoria.
Mrs. Schleicher, before she left Ottawa, asked us to see her at her office and put a bundle of faded letters on her desk. They were addressed to her by the late Emily Carr, and contained drawings she had done of Emily and herself about 30 years ago.
"This is my good-bye for Ottawa!" she said. "I've wanted to show you this for a long time..."
She pointed to a fine pen drawing by herself. It showed her as a young girl carrying easel and paint box after a fast-moving dumpy Emily Carr with her little monkey chained to Emily's plump waist...
"We must have looked like a circus when we started out to Cordova Bay," Mrs. Schleicher recalled, "a circus on four wheels. Strapped on the outside were easels, bedrolls, valises and cartons of food, and inside there was the rattle of pots and pans competing with the barking and whining of Emily Carr's famous musical menagerie."
On another sketching trip the old and the young painter went to the Goldstream Flats.
The living conditions were even more primitive. A shanty was all they could find. But the natural surroundings were simply magnificent: the Flats with their straight, tremendous cedars -- as we all know them from Emily Carr's paintings in the museums.
"In color, line and mood -- it was all new and exciting!" added Edythe, to whom the older painter had opened a new world.
But Emily Carr in those days, although artistically at the height of her power, was to her contemporaries and countrymen just a funny old spinster.
The good residents of Victoria -- Victorians in the double sense of the word! -- had no understanding of Emily's new, bold simplifying style. To them she was just a "character", this plump, sloppy woman with her monkey and her pack of dogs and cats.
As a private person she was prim and prudish like the other old ladies of Victoria, but as an artist she was ahead of her time.
Yes, Emily Carr, the painter, was shockingly "modern". The pretty-pretty, photographic realism, fostered by Victorians, didn't interest her. She did not paint ordinary trees, she painted the Platonic Idea of Tree.
Her bold, whirling lines seemed to symbolize the inner life, the growth of trees, and her Indian villages, her totem poles, and ancient symbols were not merely pleasant pictures of Indian life (like Paul Kane's) but deeply spiritual experiences of an old, mysterious race.
The mere word "sex" was taboo to Emily Carr! And she made no bones about "salacious" literature like D.H. Lawrence's. What would she say today about the intellectual defenders of Lady Chatterley's Lover?
Edythe Brand Schleicher -- under which name she is better known as an artist -- is a graduate of California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where, incidentaly, Emily Carr had also studied.
Edythe continued her art work in Paris and exhibiited in Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto and Paris.
Her oil portrait of Emily Carr is in the Vancouver Art Gallery.
© By permission of Ottawa Citizen.
Copyright. The National Library of Canada.
(Revised: 19 August 1997).
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