VICTORIA — Emily Carr sweeps you off your feet, then sets you down in another world.
It’s a fantastical scene: vibrating water below, infinite sky overhead and trees, rising like supernatural sculptures, all around.
Most of Carr’s paintings are about 100 years old now, but they still pack a wallop. And today, 65 years after her death, they inspire reverence in art lovers around the globe — but most of all here in Victoria, her home town.
Yet until recently, Carr, a writer as well as an artist, wasn’t all that well-represented in this provincial capital. Mary Jo Hughes, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, noticed this when she arrived here three years ago.
“OK, so where do we have Emily Carr?” she remembers wondering as she toured the gallery. The space where her paintings were displayed, Hughes added, was “practically a broom closet.”
“Emily Carr: On the Edge of Nowhere” — a reference to Carr’s description of the Canadian wilderness — is Hughes’ major expansion of that small space. The exhibition of some 65 Carr paintings is on view at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria through June 2013, with the next drop-in guided tour set for 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20.
And while the gallery is on Moss Street, off the tourist track about a mile and a quarter from the Coho ferry dock, another tribute practically greets the disembarking passengers: at the corner of Belleville and Government streets, beneath the Fairmont Empress Hotel is a larger-than-life statue of Carr, unveiled last month.
She’s here in bronze, with her dog, Billie, beside her and her pet monkey, Woo, perched on her shoulder.
Passers-by may see her as a bit of an eccentric — as she was viewed by some of her contemporaries. Carr wasn’t showered with praise for her art until later in her life and suffered through times of intense self-doubt.
Encouragement
During one of those crises, her fellow artist Lawren Harris, a member of Canada’s Group of Seven, sent her a letter.
“Despair is part of every creative individual,” he wrote. Yet “one rises out of it,” by lifting the mind and heart up and away from the workaday world.
“I hope all your sails are up and full of the winds of heaven,” Harris told his friend. “There is only one way: Keep on.”
Carr did — and she found her true north in Canada’s forest cathedrals.
In her day, though, polite society considered the wilderness a perilous, even savage place no nice lady would spend time in.
Carr didn’t let such narrow-mindedness bind her feet. She left her house in Victoria to explore the isolated rain forests of British Columbia and beyond, and to learn about First Nations cultures.
“This is exactly where I want to be . . . what I want to express is here and I love it. Amen!” Carr wrote.
“Go out there,” she urged her viewers, “into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them, expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection.”
Documentary film
The artist’s life, and Harris’ letter, also inspired a documentary film, “Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers and the Spirits of the Forest,” to screen at the University of Victoria’s Cinecenta theater Nov. 24 through 27. For details, see www.Cinecenta.com.
The movie, said Hughes, is a vivid, expansive picture of both Carr’s art and the wild places she loved.
“We know from [Carr’s] journals that she really toiled,” over her art, “but when she was successful, it has that effortlessness,” Hughes added. The curator believes Carr’s most thrilling work comes from when the artist was in her 50s and 60s.
“To me, that’s exciting: If we have a passion and we follow it, it doesn’t matter if we do it later in life . . . She found her real fulfillment in her art,” by continuing to expand her boundaries both artistic and geographic.
In 1910, at age 39, Carr had gone to Paris to explore the realm of European style, Hughes noted. She enjoyed some success there but wanted to develop herself as a painter and make a new kind of art, glorifying the far edge of the North American continent.
Many of the other female artists of the era never changed their style, Hughes said, or they got married and stopped painting or sculpting altogether.
Carr, immersed in her beloved woods, kept working.
“I don’t want to trickle out,” she wrote. “I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush.”
That gush fills the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria — and it still enchants people, said Hughes.
“She never got complacent,” she added. “That’s why she stands up as such a strong artist today.”
