From 1928 to 1930, Emily Carr set out on her final major painting excursions to the northern coastal and interior regions of British Columbia, revisiting many of the sites she had visited in 1912, during her first research trips. She went to the Nass and Skeena region, Haida Gwaii, Friendly Cove and Quatsino, where she produced numerous studies which would later be used as sources for her more developed studio paintings. These smaller works, produced in situ during this period, included watercolours, charcoal drawings on manila paper, numerous notebook sketches as well as rapidly completed "plein air" works on board, such as the small painting, "Two Totems", likely completed "in situ" at the village of Gitanyow.
At this time, Carr began to project her own sense of spirituality into her paintings of First Nations culture, inspired by what she saw as their inherent transcendental power and cultural significance. Through extensive journeys to Indigenous villages throughout the interior and coastal areas of British Columbia, Carr sought to portray the central and emanating cultural and spiritual forces of the subjects using distilled and reduced form. She also continued to maintain her fidelity to the original Indigenous sources, by accurately depicting the features of figures and imagery that comprised the totems, welcome figures, house posts and community houses.
By the late 1920s, Carr had fully internalized her French studies and her focus now was on reflecting the Indigenous sources without the embellishment of fragmented brushwork and heightened colour, as she highlighted her focus on the spiritual nature of Indigenous artistic and cultural expression. Studies from the site visits during these travels were later used as sources for many of the masterworks of her mature period, reflecting her practice of working up major canvasses from "in situ" sketches and drawings. This practice allowed her to create the familiar stylized large-scale easel works for which Carr became known in her later career. In this later work, figures in the village sites and landscapes appear less often, which reflected this new stylization and formal concern, as well as the changes that had occurred in many of the village sites since her earlier trips. Colonial incursions, including disease, forced dispossession and dislocation had resulted in the depopulation and dismantling of many village sites, an effect which had left many irrevocably changed.
The heightened or non-objective chroma, use of outlining and close- cropping focus of her modern training can be seen in the original sketches from this period. Here, Carr begins to emphasize the monumentality of the form. Key to the works of this period was Carr’s ability to depict the underlying formal structure within her subjects and to use their key features as unifying forces in her work.
Carr’s journey to the village of Gitanyow, or Kitwancool as Carr called it, a Gitxsan village located on a branch of the Skeena River, is documented in the story, "Kitwancool", from the Governor General Award-winning memoir and story collection, "Klee Wyck", published in 1941. The story depicts Carr’s struggle to access the Gitanyow community. Her encounters with the hereditary chief’s family, including the matriarch, Chief Miriam Douse Gamlakyeltqu, are emblematic in their revelation of Carr’s own assumptions and lack of awareness about the political activism of the Douse family. Responding to Mrs. Douse’s query about why she has come to the village, Carr explains that she wants to "make some pictures of the totem poles." When pressed further for her reasons for doing so, Carr responds: “The young people do not value the poles as the old ones did. By and by there will be no more poles. I want to make pictures of them, so that your young people as well as the white people will see how fine your totem poles used to be.” This ‘salvage paradigm’—the belief in a disappearing culture that must be conserved and documented by colonial forces—is neatly summarized in this statement. Despite this, Mrs. Douse, her husband, and family, welcomed Carr as a guest in their home during her time in Gitanyow, and Carr set about a project to archive her discoveries. Carr’s work from this visit also includes a watercolour portrait, titled "Mrs. Douse, The Chieftainess of Kitwancool" while the series of works that emerge from this time at Gitanyow depict with clarity the village’s many totems for which it was well- known.
"Two Totems" is part of a series of studies produced at Gitanyow. It is a confident work comprised of oil on board, very likely produced "en plein air" at the village site and a compelling painting in its own right. Carr employs denaturalized colour learned and refined since her time in Normandy; swaths of viridian green and ultramarine blue applied as washes efficiently reference the forest that is the backdrop to the scene. The composition is closely cropped, revealing only a small section of the two totems to highlight the detail and power of their individual characters. The totems are equally held in place compositionally by the house structure located behind them: mapped as negative space within an efficiently blocked-in composition, its surface of Payne’s grey and umber frames a cavernous door in deep black.
Carr has taken pains to depict the detail of the totem’s several human figures, outlined in black for later reference: in one pole, a mother and child figure, crowned with a frieze of other children, reflects a motif repeated in the Vancouver Art Gallery studio painting, "Totem Mother, Kitwancool", 1928. Reflecting on this moment in her story, Carr writes: “I sat in front of a totem mother and began to draw–so full of her strange, wild beauty that I did not notice the storm that was coming, till the totem poles went black, flashed vividly white and then went black again.” One can imagine that, ensconced in the family of her hosts, Carr may have been especially aware of the relations that are depicted here, when she notes: “The mothers expressed all womanhood–the big wooden hands holding the child were so full of tenderness, they had to be distorted enormously in order to contain it all. Womanhood was strong in Kitwancool. Perhaps, after all, Mrs. Douse might let me stay.”
"Two Totems" is among other similar smaller oil on panel works, including a further panel of similar scale, likely from the same village in 1928. Additional comparable works from this period include "Kitwanga Pole" (BC Archives), "Kitwancool", 1928 (Glenbow Museum) and "Totem Poles, Kitwancool Village", 1928. Several studies from this excursion were also later developed into large studio works.
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 the author of the Art Canada Institute’s "Emily Carr: Life & Work", available at www.aci-iac.ca.
