Emily Carr. Kate Braid
or on vacant lots. Outdoors, Emily found texture, shape, and space. As she sketched, half awake, half dreaming, she felt completely engaged with the landscape – body and soul.
Back in her boarding house, Mrs. Piddington watched Emily closely and called her “my dear” in the English way Emily hated because she was sure Mrs. Piddington didn’t mean it. One day Mrs. Piddington wondered aloud how Emily could have managed to get through a huge crowd outside so quickly because when Mrs. Piddington left the house right after Emily, she couldn’t move for all the people coming out of the cathedral.
Emily replied she’d found a nice, quiet side street: “The house doors opened so quaintly right onto the pavement,” she explained. “All the windows had close green shutters; nearly every shutter had a lady peeping through. There was a red lantern hanging over each door. It was all romantic, like old songs and old books!”
“Stop it! Little donkey!” shouted Mrs. Piddington, and told Emily she’d just walked through San Francisco’s notorious red light district.
“What is a red light district?”
“A place of prostitutes.”
“What are prostitutes?”
That evening after supper, Mrs. Piddington pulled her chair so close to Emily’s, their knees touched.
“Sit there, little fool,” she ordered. “Your sister has no right to send you out into the world as green as a cabbage. Listen!”
Half an hour later, Emily crept up the stairs to her room, afraid of every shadow, every door. Mrs.
Piddington had told her that evil lurked everywhere in San Francisco. There were opium dens, she said, and drug addicts, kidnappings, prostitution, murders. The very sidewalks could open up and swallow a young woman and she would be taken into something called “white slavery” and never heard from again. Even the art school district, Mrs. Piddington warned, was very, very dangerous.
Emily locked the door tight behind her and crept to the window. As she stared outside at the “evil” city, she touched the canary’s cage and felt his familiar nibble on her finger. After a while, she said out loud, “Dick, I don’t believe it, not at all. If it was as wicked as she said the black would come up the chimneys and smudge the sky; wicked ones can shut their doors and windows but not their chimneys. There is direct communication always between the inside of the houses and the sky…. San Francisco’s sky is clear and high and blue.” Mrs. Piddington had warned her never, ever to go off the main streets, never to speak to anyone and never to answer if anyone spoke to her. “I’ll do that,” Emily solemnly told her small, yellow bird. “But all the rest I am going to forget!”
No doubt Mrs. Piddington sent a letter back to Edith in Victoria, telling her that although Emily was working hard at school, she was taking liberties. She had not only discovered Grant Street but she was taking guitar lessons (had even joined a club) and only went to church where and when she felt like it. Perhaps the Carr sisters found themselves free to leave Victoria for a year, or they were curious and wanted to share her adventure, or simply to be closer to Dick, who now had tuberculosis like his mother and was in a sanatorium in southern California. Perhaps they didn’t trust Emily, alone in the big city with her silly plan to become an artist. Whatever the reason, in Emily’s second year in San Francisco, Edith, Lizzie, and Alice all came to stay with her for one year. While they were there, they insisted she come with them on visits and family outings, and Emily worried that she wasn’t working hard enough at her art.
At school, she moved from the drawing of plaster casts to painting still lifes under a professor with “ogle-eyes” who she was afraid of.
His main suggestions to her were, “Scrape, repaint.” Over and over. “Scrape, repaint.” Sometimes he just roared, “Scrape!” One day when he had done that four times in a row, Emily shouted back, “I have, and I have, and I have!”
“Then scrape again!”
In a fury she scraped the paint off her canvas and wiped the oily mess on a rag. Then she threw new paint onto the canvas, grabbed her paint box, and ran out of the studio in order to hide her tears.
When she had gone, one of the students told the teacher he was hard on the little Canadian.
“Too bad, too bad!” he said. “But look there!” and pointed to the painting. “Capital! Spirit! Colour! It has to be tormented out of the girl, though. Make her mad, and she can paint.”
Before Emily could finish her course, she was called home by her guardian because, he said, she had “played at art” long enough. Probably there was not enough money left to support her. After three years in San Francisco, Emily returned to Victoria.
Emily’s sisters, although they loved her, continued to be both over-protective and critical of her, the baby of the family, and Emily was often cross with them. Her sisters were among the founders of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the YWCA, and because there was not yet a headquarters in Victoria, people often came to the Carr house to talk and pray. Her sister Lizzie wanted to be a missionary, and Emily hated it that their house was now full of what she called “the missionary blight.”
Proper Victorian women didn’t usually work outside the home, but the Carr family was now in what was called, “reduced circumstances.” With four sisters at home and brother Dick in hospital in California, Emily had to earn an income, and although at first she felt a little afraid of her pupils, she began to teach drawing to children in the family dining room.
But the room was too dark. The children created mess and noise and there was trouble with her sisters after every class, and so, feeling brave after her taste of independence in California, Emily asked Edith if she could use the loft of the old cow barn for a studio.
Reluctantly, Edith agreed. The barn was in poor repair. Emily used all her money to pay a carpenter to fix the leaky roof, but still there was a problem because the loft, like the dining room, didn’t have enough light for painting. With no money left, Emily and Bong, the family servant, tackled the problem themselves. They fitted two old windows into the roof to make a skylight. They fixed the leaks, put in a stove, blocked the pigeon holes, and burlapped the walls. Soon, even if it smelled a bit like cow, Emily was cozy and warm with her students above and the warm, snuffing noises of the old cow chewing below. Outside on the roof, a beautiful peacock began to come to preen, using the dormer window as his mirror.
Before long there were several students attending Miss Carr’s art classes in the loft above the cow barn. Emily was a natural teacher, almost as playful as the children. If they got too noisy, she would drop through the trap door into the cow’s manger, creep through the barn, and run up the studio stairs to surprise them and set them back to work.
She also continued her own work, changing from the art school focus on portrait and still life toward landscape. In those days in Victoria, the only place an artist could exhibit was among the crocheted afghans and fresh-baked pies at the Victoria fall fair, and twice, Emily’s pen and ink drawings won first prize.
In the summer of 1898, Emily took the steamer Willipa to Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island to visit her sister Lizzie. She stayed in the small mission house near the reserve where about two hundred members of the Ucluelet band of the Nootka (now called Nuu-chah-nulth) nation lived.
To her, this way of life outside the city was all new. She loved having so few rules, being on the shore between the vast calm of sea and of forest. She loved being outside all day in the fresh air, eating fresh fish, wandering as she liked. Time slowed down and people let her do mostly as she pleased. The prisoner of strict Victorian rules and manners could feel her chains being loosened.
One day soon after