Free Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto Page A

name. Many people were simply astonished that they had never heard of her before. Once she had been regarded as an outcast and misfit. Now, increasingly, she was seen as someone who represented her place and time, and something much more. In 1939, when the exhibition entitled A Century of Canadian Art was mounted at the Tate Gallery in London, Emily Carr would be represented by four paintings and be described as a truly original and distinctive “Canadian” painter.

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 toEmily 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, oneon 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.” Although they were separated by age (Harris was fourteen years her junior) and by background, it is clear that the two artists had a strong friendship. In Harris, Emily had found a mentor, a teacher, and something of a soulmate. Although, in her journals, she deprecates her own work in comparison to Harris’s, it is evident that she saw herself as his equal. She admitted that his work influenced her, not that she wanted to paint like him, and that he was after something she wanted, too.
    Another mentor influenced Emily, the painter Mark