Emily Carr – Cumshewa

“Cumshewa seems always to drip, always to be blurred with mist, its foliage always to hang wet-heavy … these strong young trees … grew up round the dilapidated old raven, sheltering him from the tearing winds now that he was old and rotting … the memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain”.

(Emily Carr)

Emily Carr, Cumshewa, 1912

I have been rereading L.M.Montgomery’s novel “Anne of Green Gables” these days and one thing led to another, long story short, I discovered the wonderful vibrant watercolours of the Canadian painter Emily Carr. These paintings have been my most recent artistic discovery and I am still taking in their beauty as days pass by. Emily Carr had a long and interesting career; in 1890, at the age of nineteen, after her parents had died, she decided to pursue art professionally. For three years she studied art in San Francisco, made her first artistic and sketching trip to a native village of Ucluelet in 1898, lived and worked in London and Paris in the following decade until finally returning to Canada in 1904. She took up a teaching job and taugh art to small children, but the desire for wilderness was always brewing inside of her soul and in the summer of 1912 she travelled north to Haida Gwaii, Moresby Island and Upper Skeena River, eager to portray and document through her watercolours the villages, art and totems of the indigenous people.

In her public lecture titled “Lecture on Totem Poles”, Carr gives a statement on her artistic, and we could even say her ethnological and anthropological, mission: “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.” It is sad to think that even in those times the native art was a thing soon to be swallowed up by modernisation. It is also interesting to think of just how strange this native art and religions were to people of Carr’s time, and to think of the two coexisting worlds; the prim and proper world of the settlers, such as was L.M.Montgomery and her literary heroine Anne of Green Gables, and the strange and mysterious world of the indigenous people. Carr even made rugs and pottery in the style of the native art, but felt that it was slightly exploitative towards the First Nation people. Sadly, Carr’s watercolours weren’t well received and she felt so despondent that she gave up painting all together for more than a decade.

Emily Carr, House Posts, Tsatsinuchomi, B.C., 1912

Emily Carr, Alert Bay, 1912, watercolour over graphite on wove paper

I love the exotic, mystical aura around these watercolours in relation to the motifs they portrait, but what I love most of all in these watercolours is the display of the artist’s pure, sincere, almost childlike curiosity and wonder at what she was seeing. This sincere wonder is evident in every brushstroke, in the diligency and attentiveness to every detail. The colours are vibrant, but natural simultaneously, not garish or over the top.

The watercolour above, “Cumshewa”, is a beautiful display of this freshness of colours and free expression, the man-made totem fits in so well with its natural surrounding that it seems it sprung from nature herself. The mountains in the background are intensely blue, there are dark, voluminous clouds gathering in the sky, the grass is verdant and littered with colourful wildflowers. Here is something Carr wrote about a Haida village on Moresby Island called Cumshewa: “Cumshewa seems always to drip, always to be blurred with mist, its foliage always to hang wet-heavy … these strong young trees … grew up round the dilapidated old raven, sheltering him from the tearing winds now that he was old and rotting … the memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain“.

Watercolour “Alert Bay” is interesting because it shows not only indigenous architecture and totems, but also Carr’s interest in the people behind the art, the lively communities of people. Watercolour “Skedans”, to me, shows the spirituality directly emerging from the forces of nature, the lake and the wooden totems, the grass, the sky above, all seem in a perfect harmony.

Emily Carr, Ankeda, 1928, watercolour and graphite on paper

Emily Carr, Skedans, 1912