Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

the title, The Rum’un and the Oddity .
    Another self-portrait was painted in 1925, when Emily was fifty-four, and is much more unusual. The artist is seen from the back, her face invisible. One hand holds a palette and brushes, the other is raised to the easel. The red straps of an apron are visible around her neck. It reminds me of a painting by another independent and maligned woman who suffered prejudice because of her choice of career—the early seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting was made in Rome three hundred years before Emily’s painting, yet the pictures are astonishingly similar. Emily might even have seen the earlier painting in London, where it is part of the Royal collection. Although Artemisia’s face is visible in a three-quarter view, she too holds a palette and brushes in her left hand while her right hand is raised to the canvas. She too wears a green dress. Instead of an apron string around her neck, she wears a gold chain to which a little masklike face is attached. Even the faceof Artemisia, with its rounded cheeks and black hair, puts us in mind of Emily.
    In a standard self-portrait, the artist looks forward in a frontal view, using a mirror to capture the pose. A more complicated arrangement of mirrors would have been necessary for both Emily and Artemisia to see themselves in the unusual perspective they chose, and no doubt the pose is intentional, for the pictures lack the quality either of vanity or self-scrutiny associated with a mirror. Both women want to be acknowledged as artists, not only by painting their own portrait, but also by showing themselves in the act of creating the picture we are looking at.
    A late self-portrait by Emily dates from 1938, when she was sixty-seven years old. It was done on paper with thinned paint, and is dashed off with all the bravura of an artist in complete command of her brush. She looks out at the viewer directly now, almost glares, almost a force of nature herself. The portrait is solid and uncompromising. The colours are all earth and forest tones. The brush strokes swirl and swoop. Flecks of white highlight the nose, a corner of the mouth, an errant wisp of hair. The mouth is set, still determined. The eyes are full of intelligence. The picture is grand and stately, and has the same frank self-acknowledgment that we see in Rembrandt’s magnificent late self-portraits. Here I am, thepainting says, confronting us: a woman, a human being. It is an extraordinary painting.
    There is another way for an artist to make a self-portrait, and that is to imbue some inanimate object with qualities she sees in herself. The term used for this is anthropomorphism: to endow non-human objects with human feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Human qualities can also be attributed to animals, representations of deities, and natural phenomena. The anthropomorphic tendency is often found in religion, mythology, children’s stories, and of course in art and literature.
    Emily found such a representation in a totem pole. She called the figure Zunoqua, the wild woman of the woods, and she met this woman three times. The meetings are described in her journals and in the story “D’Sonoqua” in the book Klee Wyck .
    The most striking of the paintings that resulted from these meetings, and one of the most unusual in the whole of Carr’s work, is Zunoqua of the Cat Village . Filling the left side of the picture is a stylized figure with exaggerated dark eyes and a grimacing mouth. The head is draped with a serpent. Behind the figure, the vegetation is a whirl of swirling green waves, from which the faces of yellow-eyed cats stare out. The effect is uncanny. The words that Emily used in herjournal to describe her experience are forceful and evocative: “ferocious, creepy, full of unseen things . . . that was some place! There was power behind it.”
    In Klee Wyck, Emily describes how