Literature
Emily Carr, “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, Toronto, 1966, page 106
Gerta Moray, “Northwest Coast Native Culture and the Early Indian Paintings of Emily Carr, 1899‒1913” (PhD. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1993), vol. I, pages 325–326
Emily Carr, “Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings”, ed. Susan Crean, Vancouver, 2003, page 204
In 1907, while on a sightseeing trip to Alaska with her sister Alice, Emily Carr encountered an unlikely installation of Tlingit and Haida poles, placed together in a tourist park at Sitka. The poles had been removed from their diverse original village sites and featured in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, before being installed at Sitka. Her watercolour of this site, “Totem Walk at Sitka” (1907) is one of Carr’s first depictions of totems. During this trip, Carr also met an American artist, likely Theodore Richardson, who described his project of documenting Indigenous art and architecture in situ. He travelled with Indigenous guides to produce watercolours and pastels in southeast Alaska documenting the Tlingit culture. It is possible that these encounters inspired Carr to initiate her own five–year project
of documenting Indigenous villages and their neighbouring forests in British Columbia.
After her return from France in 1912, where she had studied at the Académie Colarossi, and privately, with Harry Phelan Gibb, John Duncan Fergusson and Frances Hodgkins, Carr began her project, embarking on the most extensive excursion she had ever taken in the region. Visiting the islands of the Northwest Coast, including Haida Gwaii and the Upper Skeena River, Carr travelled with Indigenous guides in order to discover remote villages to document. She occasionally used photographs as sources, acquired from professional photographers or other travellers, but usually, she worked en plein air, drawing and painting. Her final studio paintings were drawn from these vibrant field notes and sketches that reflected the influences of Fauvism and post–impressionism as well as the formal elegance of Indigenous carving and design. The works from this period are animated by active brushwork, and the reduced form of the French school: a ‘unity in movement’ that used denaturalized colour and brushwork as a structural component.
In her journal, Carr wrote, “I decided to try and make as good a representative collection of those old villages and wonderful totem poles as I could, for the love of the people and the love of the places and the love of the art; whether anybody liked them or not.... I painted them to please myself in my own way, but I also stuck rigidly to the facts because I knew I was painting history.”
In 1912, Carr visited the village of Masset on Haida Gwaii. It was her last stop on the islands. The Village of Yan, located across the Masset Inlet and still used by locals for potato farming, became an obsession. She spent two long days there, according to her own record, in “Lecture on Totems,” noting the rain and wildness of the days, which was challenging since she could only paint between rainfalls: “There is a mighty calm about Yan,” she wrote, “the great solemn unpainted poles, with a carpet of fireweed running [in a] wild riot of colour around their base.” It figured prominently in a series of at least seven finished studio canvases that emerged from this visit. The journey she made also took place during a time of First Nations protests against settler encroachment on Aboriginal lands and its economic and cultural impact. Art historian Gerta Moray notes that these were the most thorough and complete record of a location and the “largest number of sketches she made in any location” during this journey. Moray also speculates that an earlier visit from artist Will Taylor in 1909 (in which he relayed to anthropologist Harlan Smith at the American Museum of Natural History, the sale price of totems Carr had painted at the cost of $1 per foot) may have added urgency to her sense of documenting the old village site. In addition, its proximity to Masset and the steamship route may have also made them seem vulnerable.
“Yan, Q.C.I.,” 1912 may have been completed onsite rather than in the studio, and is comprised of a complex range of neutralized greens, blues and greys to unify the moving underbrush, beachfront and backlit northern sky. A celestial silver emanates from the horizon, where cloud comprised of dense, layered brushwork places a series of totems in silhouette. A hint of viridian and cerulean blue rises above the cloud, as sky melts into a glowing mauve, a colour that Carr infuses the totems with in classic post–impressionist ‘unifying’ formalism. Here, Carr also uses the technique of outlining introduced by her French studies, to individually record the figures on the totems themselves. The poles feature a series of bird crest figures that Moray notes are prominent features of the Yan poles, and the bird forms had preoccupied Carr during her research on Haida Gwaii. However, a study of light and of picture–making remains top of mind, as some totems fade into the dusk, their leaning and fallen profiles seeming to stand in for an overall narrative of loss and nature’s reclamation. “Yan, Q.C.I.” is a diligent documentation, pictured at the site of the totems’ original raising, and within reach of the small settlement. These proximities to the village are important—the poles are depicted as part of a living legacy of the region and reveal how they are part of a wholistic expression of art and architecture. The painting also reveals Carr grappling with the challenge she has set before herself: a complex village site which featured approximately 50 remaining poles or house posts. Addressing only a select few in this work, through the series Carr depicted almost half of them. Works from this period such as “Tanoo, Q.C.I.” 1913, (BC Archives), “Totem Poles, Kitseukla”, 1912, (Vancouver Art Gallery) and the larger studio work, “Yan, Q.C.I.”, 1912 (Art Gallery of Hamilton) show a similar approach to land and sky.
“Yan, Q.C.I.”, 1912 is one among over two hundred paintings produced by Carr during this period. A select number were exhibited in 1913, in the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in BC at that time and held at the Dominion Hall in Vancouver, the culmination of five years of work. Carr offered them to the provincial art collection in 1913, then a newly designated branch of the Royal British Columbia Museum. Unfortunately, the reviews were mixed, and when she offered the paintings to the new provincial museum they were refused for their vividness and expressiveness.
We extend our thanks to Lisa Baldissera, Canadian art historian, Director of Griffin Art Projects and former chief curator at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon for contributing the preceding essay. Lisa is author of the Art Canada’s Institute’s “Emily Carr: Life & Work”, available at www.aci-iac.ca.
