Delicate and luminous, the first – ‘War Canoes, Alert Bay’, completed around 1908 – is a watercolour of a pair of traditional boats built by the First Nations Kwakwaka’wakw tribe. Also titled ‘War Canoes, Alert Bay’, the second painting depicts a pretty much identical scene. Except it’s twice the size and, ditching watercolour for oil paint, Carr has used every hot hue in her paint box to transform the scene into a blazing post-impressionist idyll. The difference is five years – and a stint in Paris.
These pictures, such as ‘Tanoo’ (1913), are revered in Canada. But were it just a tale of an intrepid young woman beefing up her studies of British Columbia with a borrowed, Frenchified painting style, this show would falter after its first few works. Instead Carr’s story is odder and more engrossing than that, and her art grows richer and stranger with it. There are long stretches of obscurity and poverty, during which she runs a boarding house, breeds Old English sheepdogs and doesn’t paint at all. When, in the late-1920s, she finally finds an audience for her work, she discovers that her methods and subjects no longer match her ambitions. So, while the first part of the exhibition is all accumulation (of knowledge, insight into other cultures) the second is about letting go – of her training and technical ability, along with the spiritual emblems of cultures not her own.
What she discovers as a result is her own kind of religion – an unmediated worship of nature, particularly the towering verticals of pines and firs.
