Art: THE LAUGHING ONE

TO the solid citizens of Victoria, B.C., Emily Carr was a painful puzzle. Born into a conservative Victoria family (in 1871) she was dreamy and snappish from the start.

Fleeing to London to study art, she came back with an incomprehensible bad habit—smoking cigarettes. Trailing ; thin plume of smoke, Emily escaped again, this time to Paris. In Paris she felt “like a pine tree in a pot,” but learned to paint in what she called “the despised, adorable, joyous, modern way.”

When Emily Carr’s money ran out, she returned to teach art in Victoria. But no one wanted to learn from her; it was generally agreed that the home town girl had not made good and that her paintings were simply terrible. To support herself, she opened a boarding house, raised puppies and made pottery and hooked rugs for sale on the side.

Soon the defiantly avant-garde Emily Carr of youth was transformed into a dumpy, frumpy, acidulous old maid. She would plod the staid streets of Victoria with a monkey on her shoulder and a mangy sheep dog at her heels, pushing a baby carriage full of groceries, while neighbors sneered, smirked, winced, howled or froze with disdain.

The Indians, in their fishing villages north of Victoria, knew an entirely different woman. They called Emily Carr “The Laughing One.” Whenever she could get away from Victoria she appeared among them to paint pictures of their harsh hushed land and works. “It must be understood, she wrote in old age, “that my collection of Indian pictures was not done in a comfortable studio. You have got to go out and wrestle with the elements, with all your senses alert . . . You have got to hold your nose against the smell of rotten fish, and you’ve got to have the creeps. You must learn to feel the pride of the Indian in his ancestors, and the pinch of the cold, raw damp of the West Coast, and the smell and flavor of the wood smoke, and the sting of it in your eyes . . .”

By fervently distilling such experiences in her paintings, Emily Carr made her outwardly shabby life an inner triumph. By the time of her death in 1945 she ranked among the foremost painters of the Western Hemisphere. But clearly for her the prize was in the struggle and not in success. For her the Indian world mattered a lot more than the art world.

This week in Ottawa, the National Gallery opened a small show of Emily Carr’s oils and watercolors. Her Blunden Harbor (opposite) exemplifies as well as any one painting can the great strength and strangeness that is in all her best work.