Emily Carr by Lewis Desoto

Author:Lewis Desoto [DeSoto, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670067381
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Published: 2012-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lawren

Emily’s most significant and fruitful encounter on her 1927 trip was her meeting with Lawren Harris, one of the founders of the Group of Seven. His was the work that most impressed her and with which she empathized most strongly. In her diary from the period she writes, “Those pictures of Lawren Harris’s, how I did long to see them again . . . I have never felt anything like the power of those canvases. They seem to have called to me from some other world, sort of an answer to a great longing.”

Harris invited Emily to visit him in his studio on a couple of occasions. They spent long hours in conversation. They seemed to have an immediate affinity for each other. Following these visits Emily wrote down detailed descriptions of the paintings she saw in the studio, and a few pages later, describing the view from the train, she uses the same lyrical language, as if she were seeing the landscape through Harris’s eyes.

Harris completely supported the nationalist enterprise in which the Group of Seven was engaged, but it was apparent to Emily that he also thought of art in religious and mystical terms. He told Emily that she had got the spirit of the country into her paintings, and he probably meant “spirit” in more ways than one. Harris saw the originality in Carr’s approach to her subject matter. He understood the contribution she was making to the new Canadian art. He wrote to her saying, “I feel there is nothing being done like them in Canada . . . their spirit, feeling, design, handling, is different and tremendously expressive of the British Columbia Coast—its spirit perhaps far more than you realize.”

Harris and his wife were very much interested in theosophy, a school of thought whose adherents saw the northern landscape as a source and expression of the divine force that animates the world. This struck a chord in Emily’s always latent religiosity. She felt that Harris had succeeded in expressing a spiritual essence in his work. “Although the rest of the Group pictures charm and delight me, it is not the same spiritual uplifting,” she wrote in her journal of December 1927. Harris’s paintings “satisfy a hunger and rest the tired in me and make me so happy . . . they make my thoughts and life better.... It is as if a door had opened, a door into unknown tranquil spaces.... I seem to know and feel what he has to say.”

Harris recommended some books to Emily, and before she left Toronto she managed to find two of the titles, one on art and the other on some of the mystical ideas in which he was interested. She read the books, thought about them, and discussed them with Harris in the correspondence that subsequently developed between them. Of these letters, Emily commented in her journal, “They were the first real exchanges of thought in regard to work I had ever experienced. They helped wonderfully.”

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