Deep Forest: the Soul of Emily Carr

Forest, British Columbia, by Emily Carr (Canada) 1931 or 1932

Deep Forest: the Soul of Emily Carr

The forest is alive, a living, breathing entity, for Emily Carr. In this painting, Forest, British Columbia, circa 1931, viewed at the Albright Knox Gallery’s exhibition, Northern Lights, in Buffalo, the artist enters the inner sanctum and shows the interior with exquisite reverence. 
It is often said that the west coast forests of Canada are Carr’s cathedrals. Here, the spirit of the woods is an almost figurative goddess, a presence both tangible and fluid, a hooded, shrouded being of mystery. The curvatures of trunks and boughs wind together, and combined with our profoundly intimate point of entry, creating an almost sexual suggestion, similar to the effect of Georgia O’Keeffe’s extreme close ups of flowers.

Canadian artist Emily Carr, who lived from 1871 to 1945, trained in a range of ways, starting at the California School of Design in San Francisco as a teenager after the death of both parents, followed by a couple of years in London, England, time in Paris, and a stint in an English fishing village artist’s colony. 
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But wherever she went to work and study, she longed for the ancient forests of home. The spectacular woodlands of west coast Canada include the coastal forests, old growth forests, dense interior forests, inland temperate rainforests, and the boreal or Taiga forest way up north by the Yukon and Alaska borders, considered today to be the world’s largest intact forest on earth.  These multilayered canopies danced with conifers like western hemlock and redcedar, and some of the largest spruce trees in the world, along with balsam poplars, trembling aspens, and ponderosa and lodgepole pines. From coastal muskeg peatlands to alpine tundra, these forests are home to grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, moose, caribou, coyotes, wolves, and eagles. 

This was Emily’s real classroom, the soul of her work and everything that mattered to her. The natural world and its mysteries and power was as important to Emily as it was to the Indigenous people she revered. She travelled to islands and northern and interior forestlands solo on horseback and boat, and into remote Indian villages, to learn all she could about nature and the first nations people, all of which were, to her, the real world.  "The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss," she wrote in her diaries. 

Emily rejected the traditional, mechanical, representational perspective of art that still dominated instruction in her day, a view that was dissolving as more and more painters were looking to participate in creativity as a divine act driven by expression and witness over technique. She used bold, rhythmic brushstrokes to convey the dynamism and magic of her subject matter. “There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.”

Emily’s rejection of tradition in art and in femininity was looked upon with wariness and misgiving, and it cost her clients and pupils. Her respect for Indigenous peoples and their ways was met with suspicion, too, by the society surrounding her. It was exceedingly rare for women to be independent, unmarried, and defiantly travel alone into dangerous realms and into men’s terrain like the frontier. 

Emily didn’t care: she did what she wanted. And she painted the way she wanted, for her own reasons. She found profound meaning and importance in both her own artistic growth, on her own terms, and in the history of the land and its original peoples.

“Whenever I could afford it, I went up north, among the Indians and the woods, and forgot all about everything in the joy of those lonely, wonderful places. I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not…. I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.”

Emily’s spirit of independence and refusal to pander to the norms of Victorian society led to a diagnosis of hysteria, and she was placed in an English tuberculosis sanitorium for eighteen months. This strictly regimented institutionalization quashed her painting but only temporarily. She returned to Victoria, B.C. Canada, and to her beloved forests, spending time on the Ucluelet Peninsula with the Nuu-chah-nulth people (often called Nootka), by whom she was given the Indigenous name Klee Wyck. On a trip far up north to Alaska, she made it her life mission to paint the “vanishing totems.” Totem poles are a form of tree tower wood carvings by Pacific Northwest communities such as the Haida, Tligit, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast Salish, honouring ancestors, clan lineage, animals, and spiritual beliefs of these peoples.

"I glory in our wonderful west and I hope to leave behind me some of the relics of its first primitive greatness. These things should be to us Canadians what the ancient Briton's relics are to the English. Only a few more years and they will be gone forever into silent nothingness and I would gather my collection together before they are forever past."

For Emily, the living past and the secrets of the forests and the original peoples who were its guardians were the essence of her art and soul. She viewed the woods as a deeply spiritual place filled with the truth and the manifestation of God. “Real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.”
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Lorette C. Luzajic