Adapted from:
Sudlow, Ron. "Compelled By An Inner Urge"
Ottawa Journal. February 18, 1967.
By RON SUDLOW
VICTORIA (CP) -- Fame came late in life for Klee Wyck -- Laughing One -- the name given to Emily Carr by the Indians she lived with for half a century as she chronicled their lives with brush and pen.
But today, 22 years after her death, public appreciation of her canvases depicting British Columbia's woods, shores and Indian lore is deepening. This appreciation is reflected in the prices her paintings command.
One recently sold at a Vancouver auction for $18,000. It had been presented to the late W.G. Murrin when he retired as president of the British Columbia Electric Co. He hung it in his basement.
Commenting on the sale of Trees in the Sky, Colin Graham, curator of Greater Victoria Art Gallery, said the painting was good, "but not a top example of Emily Carr's work. It makes me wonder what a really first-class example of her work would bring. I speculate as high as $30,000."
Lack of acceptance of her work found her resorting to teaching art, running a boarding house and raising English sheepdogs to finance her trips to B.C. Indian settlements.
"I went to the Indian villages by canoe and pack horse," she once told an interviewer. "There was no transportation in those days. The totem poles were still standing, untouched by the white man. Now all that is left after the museums have taken what they want are decayed with age or cheap immitations by half-breeds who have forgotten what the symbols mean."
Other Canadians, including her neighbours, missed what she saw in the grotesque, mystic totems and failed to interpret her stark, sometimes rugged and frequently gentle canvases.
When fame came to the Victoria-born artist-author only 10 years before her death in 1945 at the age of 73, it came first from abroad.
Canadian critics began to take second looks at her paintings after she received special mention at an all-Canada show at London's Tate Gallery.
Soon her paintings began to hang in the National Gallery, in Hart House and in the Art Gallery of Toronto. Samples of her work from private collections and museums in Eastern Canada and the United States made world tours.
One art critic said "she has done for British Columbia what Tom Thomson did for Northern Ontario."
But the acclaim didn't seem to matter to her. She once said "I don't care what people think of my work. Lots of people hate it. I can't help that I am trying to express something I feel, to satisfy myself."
This philosophy seemed to prevail in her literature. Her first book, Klee Wyck, was acclaimed by the Canadian Authors' Association as "the truest picture of any aspect of British Columbia life to appear in print."
"This may be explained by the author's deep love for her native province as revealed in art and literature."
The book, a series of sketches dealing with Pacific Coast Indians, won the Governor-General's Literary Award for 1941.
A reception to mark the publication of the book, Hundreds and Thousands, drew one of the largest crowds in Victoria's history to attend a literary event.
The book was a collection of her observations of people and places, her fears and disappointments. It was compiled from notebooks between 1927 and 1941.
Her three other books received high acclaim. The Heart of a Peacock was a collection of short stories, fact and fantasy, based on her experiences with Indians, children and animals. The House of All Sorts, published the year of her death, described the people she met while operating her boarding house. The Book of Small depicted pioneer life in Western Canada.
Emily Carr's early days were not easy ones. She was one of nine children. Her father, Richard Carr, was an Englishman who first arrived in Victoria in 1849.
Both her parents were dead when Emily was 14 but her guardians were sympathetic to her aspirations and sent her to art school in San Francisco. She later studied in London and Paris.
But she "drew away from the old school methods of teaching" which brought rejection from critics.
She answered her early critics with: "I paint what I see the way I see it in the only way I know how. I've developed my style from what I felt. It is what a scene says to me, not the way it's labelled."
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Copyright. The National Library of Canada.
(Revised: 19 August 1997).
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