Vancouver Island, Through an Artist’s Eyes

Painting didn’t pay the bills, and so she ran a boardinghouse where her tenants ranged from “inanimate, mincing ninnies” to “door slammers.” The house, which is on Simcoe Street, is around the corner from the Emily Carr House, with its small rooms crammed with books, prints, old china, furniture and, in high season, Emily Carr fans.

In cooler months, the house is closed, but do walk by; in the yard, you might glimpse the “Elephant,” the trailer-like caravan that Carr acquired in 1933 for sketching trips.

But inspiration was also nearer at hand: Beacon Hill Park, the subject of many Carr paintings. Western red cedars, Douglas firs, ponds, peacocks, frothy fountains and stone bridges (one is named for Carr): It is an enchanting park, and, occasionally, a place of high drama. As we strolled, a terrible screeching arose. It was nesting season, and dozens of great blue herons burst from the mid-reaches of some tall trees. The reason for their frenzy: a bald eagle circling overhead patiently, menacingly. It was a drama that showed no signs of abating by the time we left.

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When Emily was a teenager, her mother died, and she became mysteriously distant from her father. Though she would remain close to her older sisters and had a few friends, loneliness remained a constant theme in her journals; marriage and a life of afternoon tea at the Empress seemed unlikely and undesirable. She once compared herself to “a lone old tree.”

But she also took pleasure in solitude, writing stories deep into the night, and sketching during the day. Though her work received praise, she trusted none of it. Success for her was a complex, spiritual matter; the business of melding art and godliness was an unending quest.

And, of course, she had her animals for company: a Javanese monkey who got into all sorts of trouble, multiple dogs and a white rat.

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And then there was the forest. “I sought my companionship out in the woods and trees rather than persons,” she wrote. “It was as if they had hit and hurt me … so that I went howling back like a smacked child to Mother Nature.”

And so, with the aid of the Elephant, she began producing some of her best work as she entered her 60s. “Nothing ever, ever stands still,” she wrote, “and we never, never catch up.”

It doesn’t take long to find wilderness on Vancouver Island. On yet another overcast afternoon, we pulled into a parking lot about 10 miles outside Victoria, and walked down a wide trail. This was Goldstream Provincial Park, more than 900 acres of Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock and other trees; through it all runs a river where salmon spawn each fall.

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Emily Carr loved to anthropomorphize; after reading about brown-eyed lilies and screaming trees, it was easy to imagine that the giant fern fronds on the trail weren’t just brushing against our legs, but reaching out beseechingly, or at least curiously, trying to get as much a visceral sense of us as we were of them.

In 1933, Emily had the Elephant towed to the Goldstream River flats, and there she settled down for a lengthy visit. It wasn’t her first. A few years earlier she had been there, producing sketches in which, say, a cedar branch was not a static thing, but a moving wave of foliage. (One of her most famous works, “Red Cedar,” illustrates this effort.)

No doubt she expected to experience the same productivity two years later, but a parade of parkgoers wasn’t helping. “They started early this morning — the Public,” she wrote. “The air is riled up with motor snorts, dog parks and children’s screechings.” Add to that the antics of Woo, her monkey — who consumed her green paint and had to be treated with Epsom salts — and the rain and the darkness. “I am not afraid, but it’s creepy,” she wrote, before leaving.

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To us, nothing seemed creepy, and there were few people. We arrived at the visitor’s center, which smelled of damp, fragrant wood. Everything inside, it seemed, had been made either by or for visiting school children: Nature paintings hung on the walls, and exhibits — most of them handmade — focused on things like bald eagle counts and the salmon life cycle. Outside, a deck overlooked the river; in the distance, three eagles soared above the trees.

A volunteer with a lined, sunny face expressed enthusiasm for our driving trip to the island’s western side — a trip I was nervous about after reading online warnings about the dangers of washed-out roads, aggressive logging-truck drivers and frequent rain. She brushed it all aside. “Nothing but ocean till you get to Japan!” she said of the views from the wild western coast, then gave us directions to a nearby waterfall, advising us to ignore the high safer path, and to walk instead along the dry riverbed. It was a precarious walk on slippery stones, and rain was beginning to fall, but finally, the waterfall appeared. I saw my friend far ahead of me, her jacket a tiny red smudge below the trees and the falls. Everything here was big.

We drove on, toward Albert Head Lagoon, located in a populated area where the prospects of transformative beauty weren’t promising. As it turns out, Albert Head, its beach edged with trees and strewn with driftwood, is an understated arc of paradise on this developed shore. Here and nearby, Carr found fodder for luminous sky and sea paintings such as “Strait of Juan de Fuca” and “Lagoon at Albert Head,” in which she unleashed an incredible range of colors.

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Our goal was to reach the artsy resort town of Sooke before night fell, but we decided to backtrack in hopes of finding Esquimalt Lagoon. On the way, we stumbled upon the Royal Roads Forest, a hauntingly beautiful woodland where some of the largest Douglas firs on the island are found. We wandered in the cool, dark forest, forgetting about our schedule.

The lagoon itself is a fragile place, a bird sanctuary protected by a wisp of land. Carr, seduced by the “wide sweeps of sea and sky,” arrived here on a beautiful spring day in 1934. Her caravan was deposited on a field of daisies. “Woo rolls among the daisies with her four hands in the air,” she wrote happily. But that night, an epic storm rolled in: “Everything inside blew out and outside things blew in till in and out were all mixed up.” Soon enough, the caravan was hauled to higher ground on a farmer’s field.

A few years later she would return to this area off the coast, and find inspiration in something that was basically ugly: gravel pits. Paintings called “Above the Gravel Pit,” show scenes of denuded land and tree stumps, all beneath a brilliant, rippled sky. There would be more paintings of bare landscapes, some with spindly second- or third-growth trees struggling upward beneath a blue sky.

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In this period, Maria Tippett writes in her biography, Carr approached the sketching or painting process ritualistically: Sitting on her camp stool, she might light a cigarette, sing a hymn, then “raise her gaze slightly above and just beyond her subject, so that it was out of focus. Then, with her sketching-board on her lap and brush or charcoal in her hand, she would strike out with her arm and wrist and with curved or slashing motions make great sweeping strokes.…”

Michelle Jacques, the chief curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria said that the environmentally themed exhibition, “Picturing the Giants: The Changing Landscapes of Emily Carr” — which includes Carr’s two gravel pit paintings — is based on “the hypothesis that Carr was thinking about logging and environmental issues in a real way.” In British Columbia, Ms. Jacques noted, there are currently many concerns: debates over an oil pipeline and increased shipping, salmon farming, land and resource rights for indigenous groups and, of course, protection of forests.

“There’s a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the ‘screamers,’ Carr wrote. “These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree’s heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of falling, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with their saws and axes resting and watch.”

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Later on our trip, those words would resonate.

We arrived in Sooke an hour before sunset, too late to explore Sooke Hills, which Emily had visited. We stayed at a rambling hotel on the wedding circuit with wide porches overlooking the water. On a Monday, it was nearly empty. By the water four harbor seals bobbed and rolled between moored boats. The clouds had dispersed, revealing a Prussian blue sky and the glimmer of stars. Here, in an area where the weather is notoriously moody, the clear skies that had evaded us in the supposedly milder Victoria area, would, with luck, greet us in the morning.

“You will lose coverage,” our waitress told us later that night in the hotel’s restaurant when we described our plans. She was referring to cellphone service on the farther reaches of the Pacific Marine Circle route. “But you will see animals, guaranteed. I saw elk and eagles and bears last time.” She told us that she had been born on the island, moved to Toronto, and not relishing the pace, returned. “I live over there,” she said, pointing at the dark hills across the water. “Sometimes I kayak to work.”

I thought of Carr, who had generally been eager to return home from her travels. In her journal, she recounts an exchange with a Vancouver art promoter: “‘It’s a shame to think of you stuck out here in this corner of the world unnoticed and unknown,’ says he. ‘It’s exactly where I want to be,’ says I.”

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