Canadian Artists Bundle. Kate Braid

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      Mind you, I could make any house do me but some places don’t belong to your type – squares in rounds and rounds in squares… There must be a place somewhere for me.

      – Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands

      When Emily returned from France she felt stronger “in body, in thinking, and in work” than she felt after England. She had learned invaluable lessons about colour, form, and how to say what she wanted with shape and colour. She knew the work she had done there was her best to date, but it was radically different from what was traditionally considered “good art” and when she showed it to her family and close friends, they turned away in embarrassed silence. As Emily recalled, “One [sister] was noisy in her condemnation, one sulkily silent, one indifferent to every kind of art.”

      The following spring, in Vancouver, she put on a show of her French paintings. Her bold colours were unlike anything people had seen before. They were shocked. Most people thought the new work was a joke. “This is small children’s work!” they said. “Where is your own?” Emily never took criticism lightly and now, although the newspapers gave haltingly positive reviews, she remembered only the negative responses.

      To Emily, the new work was brighter, cleaner, simpler, more intense. It had all the “bigger, freer seeing” she had been striving for. But the public thought it outlandish. Her paintings were insulted and jeered at. Her friends, when they came to visit, didn’t mention painting and averted their eyes from her walls.

      Emily had a habit of hovering at her own exhibits in hopes of overhearing people’s spontaneous comments. When her pictures were hung at an exhibition of The Fine Arts Society, she heard people laugh at her work. She said, “It could not have hurt me more had they thrown stones.”

      The schools where she had taught children refused to hire her back. A few of her old pupils came for lessons, but Emily feared it was strictly out of pity for her and “their money burnt me.”

      She refused to be ashamed of her new work. She knew the humiliating silence from her family and the jokes were a result of the conservatism of western Canada. She clung to her belief that her new ways of painting suited this new country. As she saw it, she had “broken loose from the old photographic, pretty-picture work” of docile cows beside placid rivers. That had to be left behind if she was ever to capture the wild-ness of her beloved British Columbia.

      In spite of the less than enthusiastic response to her new work, she was eager to return to the totem poles. In 1912 she launched the most ambitious of all her sketching trips to date – a six-week visit to coastal and central northern British Columbia, including Alert Bay, the Skeena River Valley, Kispiox, and the Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida Gwaii. She did dozens of drawings and paintings. As she did so, she realized she was holding back some of the more “modern” aspects of the “bigger, freer work” she had learned in France. Instead, she was “working for history,” in a photographic manner, to record what she considered the treasures of a dying culture.

      It was the first time she had spent such an extended period of time in B.C.’s forests and the first time she met D’Sonoqua.