| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Indisputably one of Canada’s titans of visual art, and one of the first Canadian painters to adopt modernism and post-impressionism, Emily Carr achieved fame and success only in her sixties. Best known for her visual studies of West Coast First Nation homes and totem poles, she was also a Governor General Award-winning writer.
Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr left for San Francisco at age 18 to study at the California School of Design. In 1899 she went to London’s Westminster School of Art to assimilate the latest developments in European painting and to the rural St. Ives art colony in Cornwall in 1901. After teaching for four years at Vancouver’s Ladies Art Club, in 1910 she travelled to France to deepen her knowledge and develop her own style.
Returning to Victoria again in 1912, Carr employed French postmodern colour and design approaches to paint decaying Haida, Gitxsan, and Tsimshian dwellings and sculptures. While her results would eventually immortalise her, she needed to earn a living, so for fifteen years Carr also ran a boarding house called the “House of All Sorts” at the opportunity cost of her art career.
When Carr was 56, fate finally favoured her through a National Gallery exhibition focused on West Coast First Nations art. There she met Lawren Harris, a Group of Seven painter who championed her work and told her, “You are one of us.” The combination of institutional and celebrity endorsement emboldened Carr to resume her vocation, which included using art to protest industrial devastation of First Nation and other B.C. lands.
In the final period of her life, Carr blossomed as a writer, drafting the Governor-General’s Award winning nonfiction book Klee Wyck (1941), and the short story collection House of All Sorts (1944), published a year before her death and based on her experiences running the rooming house. Carr has posthumously achieved international acclaim, and the Canadian Encyclopedia right calls Emily Carr “a Canadian icon.”
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