Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land

A Jungian Portrait

Phyllis Marie Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317518853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Emily Carr, often called Canada's Van Gogh, was a post-impressionist explorer, artist and writer. In Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land Phyllis Marie Jensen draws on analytical psychology and the theories of feminism and social constructionism for insights into Carr's life in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century.

Presented in two parts, the book introduces Carr's émigré English family and childhood on the "edge of nowhere" and her art education in San Francisco, London and Paris. Travels in the wilderness introduced her to the totem art of the Pacific Northwest coast at a time Aboriginal art was undervalued and believed to be disappearing. Carr vowed to document it before turning to spirited landscapes of forest, sea and sky. The second part of the book presents a Jungian portrait of Carr, including typology, psychological complexes, and archetypal features of personality. An examination the individuation process and Carr's embracement of transcendental philosophy reveals the richness of her personality and artistic genius.

Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land provides captivating reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian studies, art history, health, gender and women's studies.

Part 1

Life story

The first part in seven chapters is historical, introducing Emily Carr’s life story primarily through the lens of her autobiographical writings. We meet her family, friends and influences in the late Victorian period that led to her vocation as an artist. Trained as an artist in San Francisco, London and Paris, she was ahead of her Eastern Canadian artist peers, the Group of Seven.¹ She had the courage to go against Victorian expectations for women on the frontier. She was ahead in many other ways, too, struggling for authentic relations with her inner self, her family, community and religious institutions. A child of immigrants, she loved the land of her birth and refused to see it from hungry eyes as just a natural resource for economic exploitation. Unique for the time, she respected Aboriginal peoples, their culture and art.

Note

1The “Group of Seven” Canadian landscape painters were inspired by the natural beauty of the land and their place in it; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Seven_(artists)

Chapter 1

Introduction: a new biographic paradigm

Emily Carr was born almost 150 years ago in the small British outpost city of Victoria on Canada’s Pacific coast. At the time, no one would have imagined this fifth daughter of English immigrants – her father a wealthy “forty-niner”¹ – would become a Canadian icon, an internationally known “pioneer modernist” artist² and writer with streets, parks, schools and the Emily Carr University of Art + Design³ named after her. Courageous and ambitious with a vision of the future that included European art training, wilderness travels and personal independence, she lived in an age when home and marriage was the expectation. A post-impressionist, she sold few paintings in her lifetime and struggled with cash flow as the owner and manager of a small apartment building, Hill House. Even she may not have imagined that in 2013 one of her paintings would sell for a record $3.39 million when the most she ever received for three was $1,075.⁴ Called a genius⁵ – a word not often applied to women – she would likely dismiss this as “newspaper rot”⁶ for she had learned to distrust public opinion. Eric Newton, art critic of the Manchester Guardian, writing about her paintings for London’s 1938 Tate Gallery exhibition A Century of Canadian Art said: “If the word ‘genius’ (a word to be jealously guarded by the critic and used only on very special occasions) can be applied to any Canadian artist it can be applied to her. She belongs to no school. Her inspiration is derived from within herself.”^7,8 Her first landscapes were in the English watercolour tradition followed by documentary studies of First Nation art. After studies in France, her work is modern and highly coloured, Fauvist. After meeting Lawren Harris and the Canadian Group of Seven her paintings become simplified, symbolic and dramatic with strong feeling. After leaving Aboriginal motifs, she returned to landscape painting, this time in the forest to capture the spirit of the land. Later, she came out of the forest to paint the spirit of the sky and sea.

Much is published⁹ about Emily Carr so when a voice-over in a dream told me to write my Zürich psychoanalytic thesis¹⁰ on her, I hesitated. I knew her paintings and was proud she was Canadian – and a challenge to the oft-touted cliché of there being no great women artists. At the same time, disturbing reports existed of her “difficult” personality and eccentricities;¹¹ and we want our heroes to have “class.” While researching her life, I realized that this very “powerful aesthetic foremother”¹² had been biographically misrepresented by amateur psychologists. What was reported as Carr’s “difficult personality” was actually her ability to say “no” and having personal boundaries when women were expected to be submissive and self-sacrificing. Today, her so-called eccentricities are seen as a sense of adventurousness, self worth, independence and self-sufficiency.

Carl Gustave Jung describes dream voice-overs as the psyche shouting to get attention. He advises us to listen, and importantly, to determine the source of the voice. If it comes from a complex¹³ – a compelling emotional state – it points to psychological “issues.” If the voice comes from “The Self” – the essence of our inner being – then honouring it has the potential to enhance our psychic growth. Thus aware, I began rereading her books for Emily Carr was a writer, traveller and cartoonist, as well as a painter. Small parallels in our lives emerged: we are both women born in Western Canada to European pioneer parents, the next- to-youngest child, studied art,¹⁴ lived in England and studied in Europe. This seemed to suggest writing my thesis on her might bring greater self-understanding. And the decision felt “just right” in a Goldilocks’ kind of way.¹⁵ To a degree, this book is a revision and expansion of that thesis.

Who was Emily Carr?

What was she like? What was it like to be her? What gave her the courage to travel abroad for art studies during an era of restrictive lives for women? What motivated her to rough-travel by boat and horseback in the north wilderness with only a dog as companion? What led her to document First Nations¹⁶ art? What inspired her to paint the spirit of the land, forest, sea and sky? What is her philosophy of art? These questions are addressed in two parts.

Part I introduces Emily Carr’s life story and her quests: “Who am I? Where am I?” and importantly in Canada “Where is here?”¹⁷ We are introduced to the challenge of geographic and cultural relocation¹⁸ as we meet Emily’s transplanted English family and the larger community of British émigrés in Victoria busy recreating the homeland. Emily Carr, even as a child, found disturbing this preoccupation with replication of the homeland as it did not fit her reality. At the time, two of five people in Victoria were Aboriginal or Oriental, so the English comprised a bare majority. Outside, the immense trees, unconquerable brambles, huge waves crashing on rocky shores and white-topped mountains on the horizons bore little relation to pastel watercolour paintings of sweet English gardens hanging on parlour walls.

Emily Carr uses the term “fresh-seeing”¹⁹ to describe her approach to art and life. In her quest, she looked to the art of Aboriginal people, which she saw as important as the ancient art of other countries. Because at the time it was believed to be disappearing, she vowed to document it. Through observation she “apprenticed” in spirited Aboriginal art and through it felt the spirit of the land that she later celebrated in her forest, land, sea, and sky paintings.

Part 2 is through the lens of Jungian psychology and begins with an introduction to Jungian theory of archetypes, complexes and psychodynamics. Next is a discussion of typology or ways we experience the world and interact with others. Included is an analysis of Emily Carr’s typology. Then, we explore what I see as her psychological complexes: gender, family, migration, and cultural that of plus a discussion of her religious struggles and philosophy of art. We touch on archetypal features of her personality: the Divine Child, the Shadow and the Self. Finally, in summing up is a discussion of individuation, the process of becoming uniquely oneself. First is the hero/heroine journey of emergence from the family constellation; next is the crossing of boundaries – the descent to the nether inner regions of Self, and the awakening – and finally, resurrection and manifestation of the Self.

A new bibliographic paradigm

When I began researching Emily Carr’s life, a niggling sense arose of something not being quite right as some biographer’s claims of her personality did not fit my perception...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of photographs, paintings and plates
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Life story
• Part 2 Jungian psychodynamics
• Bibliography
• Index