Around a century ago, Emily Carr was making the most progressive art in Canada. If that’s hard to visualise (like Canadian art in general), you need only look at a couple of paintings in this belter of an exhibition. Delicate and luminous, the first – ‘War Canoes, Alert Bay’, completed around 1908 – is a watercolour of a pair of traditional boats built by the First Nations Kwakwaka’wakw tribe. Also titled ‘War Canoes, Alert Bay’, the second painting depicts a pretty much identical scene. Except it’s twice the size and, ditching watercolour for oil paint, Carr has used every hot hue in her paint box to transform the scene into a blazing post-impressionist idyll.
The difference is five years – and a stint in Paris. Born in 1871 to a wealthy Victoria (and very Victorian) family, Carr rebelliously upped-sticks, first to San Francisco and London (which she loathed), then to France to pursue her dream of becoming a painter. Armed with the latest tricks of Matisse, Derain and Gauguin, she returned to Canada to paint the totems and settlements of its dwindling aboriginal peoples.
These pictures, such as ‘Tanoo’ (1913), are revered in Canada. But were it just a tale of an intrepid young woman beefing up her studies of British Columbia with a borrowed, Frenchified painting style, this show would falter after its first few works. Instead Carr’s story is odder and more engrossing than that, and her art grows richer and stranger with it. There are long stretches of obscurity and poverty, during which she runs a boarding house, breeds Old English sheepdogs and doesn’t paint at all. When, in the late-1920s, she finally finds an audience for her work, she discovers that her methods and subjects no longer match her ambitions. So, while the first part of the exhibition is all accumulation (of knowledge, insight into other cultures) the second is about letting go – of her training and technical ability, along with the spiritual emblems of cultures not her own.
What she discovers as a result is her own kind of religion – an unmediated worship of nature, particularly the towering verticals of pines and firs. Her style changes to accommodate painting quickly, out of doors. In ‘Tree (Spiralling Upward)’ (1932) and ‘Happiness’ (1939) she captures trunks rising heavenwards while her loaded brush trips lightly around the page – partly out of necessity, Carr used cheap manila paper – as if sensing the vibrations and aftershocks of growth.
The combination of paintings, drawings, photographs, Carr’s diary entries and a fine selection of First Nations artefacts makes for an utterly transporting show. In truth, the anecdotes – about her camping out with her menagerie of pets and thinning her paint with petrol – are sometimes wilder than the work, but at her best, Carr conjures the air, the wet and the immensity of Canada’s West Coast and infuses it with her own spirit: equal parts grit, guile and gasoline.
Martin Coomer