Emily Carr exhibit arrives at AGO after beguiling Britain
Posted Apr 9, 2015 12:57 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – When London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery opened the “From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia” exhibition in November, nobody in the city knew her, says curator Ian Dejardin.
Many patrons went to the gallery to see its Rembrandt exhibition — but they walked out in love with Carr.
“I think what we saw again and again and again was the word ‘revelation,'” says Dejardin, the gallery’s director.
“It’s like Van Gogh had dropped out of the skies unknown into our laps…. I think it was the discovery of someone of this stature that was unknown to the British public and people were very moved by it.
“It’s a horrible cliche but her journey is such a moving one against the odds.”
The exhibition is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where it opens on Saturday, and Dejardin believes it might further raise the profile of the late Victoria-born artist.
“I think the important thing is that in London, 33,000 people who had not come across Emily Carr at all came across her, and were enthusiastic about her — and that must spread, I think,” he says.
“We’ll see, but I think you’ll start seeing Emily Carr brought into other contexts as well, because she fits in with many trains of European thought.”
Of course, Carr did have a specific language in her works, often depicting the B.C. landscape, particularly its trees, water and totem poles.
Hence the “From the Forest to the Sea” theme in the exhibit, which traces her journey from painting smaller, Edwardian-style watercolours to her international travels and exploration of the First Nations cultures and B.C. landscape.
In the centre of each room in the exhibition are historic indigenous artifacts from the Pacific Northwest Coast.
In total there are over 100 works, as well as the recently discovered illustrated journal “Sister and I in Alaska,” in which Carr wrote of her 1907 trip along the Northwest Coast.
Where in London the exhibit had to be a “revelation,” back in Canada it had to be “a surprise” and question preconceived ideas of who she was, say the curators.
“Something that surprised me when we started working in detail on the show is, for someone who loved British Columbia so much, how consistently she strove to kind of move out beyond that space and experience international education,” says Sarah Milroy, curator and Canadian art critic.
“She also had tremendous drive to explore culturally, to get herself up and down the coast, often in situations where she was on her own as a white person travelling with indigenous guides, which she never in the least found problematic or worrisome, but which other white people of her social class might have thought was really highly unusual if not dangerous.”
As the exhibit explains, Carr’s life was difficult at times.
At one point she suffered deep discouragement with the reception to some of her work and retreated for 15 years from public life as an artist. Her money had run out and she was breeding dogs, hooking rugs and making pottery to get by.
She made a comeback when she met the Group of Seven and started to paint in a style that would fit in with them.
On the encouragement of Lawren Harris, she found her own spirituality with the trees, skies and sea in B.C. and developed her own technique.
“I do think it’s just an innate characteristic of hers to be restless, seeking, always for the next horizon, and she did that in every aspect of her life,” says Milroy.
