Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Page B

result of deliberate choice and intention. Earlier works of hers show that, if she had been so inclined, she was quite capable of painting conventionally realistic landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. She certainly could have made a career painting that way.
    In France, Emily was exposed not only to technical changes, but also to new attitudes that allowed her to think of her subject matter in a new way. Painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin, and later, others like Picasso and Matisse, were interested in what was called the “primitive” in art. They had turned away from the nineteenth-century academic tradition of realistic painting to seek out what they believed was a more authentic subject matter. This took the form not only of painting directly in the landscape, but also of seeking out peasant subjects. This can be seen in some of the paintings made by Gauguin and Van Gogh in Brittany, for example, in which the folk customs and costumes of the French peasantry are much in evidence. Gauguin would later go to Tahiti in search of something untainted by European ways. Picassoand others would look to African masks and sculpture. These forms of non-European art were seen as fresh and original and as a source of renewal for an art that had become stale and decadent. All of this was part of a Romantic search for renewal and a return to something authentic, to a purer form of art in areas that had not been absorbed into Western industrial culture. This tendency certainly validated Emily’s interest in Native art, and gave her the confidence to pursue it when she returned to Victoria.
    By her own account, she came back from France with a “new way of seeing,” a better understanding of colour, and a way to use it expressively. When she returned to the forest and looked at the totem poles, the way they stood out against the greens of the trees would have been stunning. She would have noted the bright colours, the black outlines on the forms, the stylized way of representing figures and animals. In Native art, she saw colours that were not tied to an actual description of an animal or figure. Later, when she went deeper into the forest, the works became more sombre, the hues those of leaf and branch, but there is a tremendous variety in the greens, and all sorts of colours are used, subtly and with great refinement.
    Through the eyes of someone educated in European art, the totem poles and decorated houses would haveseemed unusually colourful and stylized. The innovative way in which animals were transformed and incorporated into the design would have appeared novel and striking. At the same time, this was a living art, not something meant to be displayed in a gallery or museum. The totem poles were integrated into their environment. They were of the place and the people.
    Emily wanted to be a Canadian painter. Even when she was in England she talked of wanting to paint the landscape of British Columbia rather than the pretty English country-side. After her first meeting with the Group of Seven painters she wrote in her diary: “Canada and her sons cry out for a hearing but the people are blind and deaf. Their souls are dead. Dominated by dead England and English traditions while living things clamour to be fed.”
    She could have stayed in Brittany. Concarneau, where she studied, was a popular artists’ colony, and many painters settled there. There were even Canadian painters who had left for France, never to return, who developed a French style. But Emily was of a different place. The light and the colour of Brittany were not for her. Even though she retained what she had learned about colour, she eventually abandoned the bright Fauve style for the moist greens and the dark shadows of the forest. One of the fathers of Impressionism, the landscapepainter Corot, who worked in the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris, had advised younger artists to “seek the muse in the forest.” Emily might