THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST
"The Forest Lover"
Susan Vreeland
Viking, 332 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Marie (Jordan) Giordano

Emily Carr, Canada’s beloved painter and writer who died in 1945 at the age of 74, lives on not only in her paintings, but in her writings and series of memoirs, and in the many books, journals, diaries, letters, essays, quotations and biographies written about her life and her work. Carr won Canada’s highest honor for literature, the Governor General’s Award, for her autobiography, Klee Wyck, in 1941.

Now we have Susan Vreeland's "The Forest Lover," a novel fictionalizing the life of this formidable artist. Mythologized to icon status since her death, Emily Carr is Canada’s most famous female artist, lauded on a par with Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe. An important artist in the late nineteenth century crisis of cultural authority, Carr might have been one of the first Gorilla Girls, a modern underground movement of female artists protesting inequality and male dominance in the art world.

"I hate this scratching for recognition," Carr complains in Forest Lover as she flails against cultural barriers and rejection. Though no crusader, she committed her life to art when women of her day were confined to the kitchen and nursery.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871, Carr’s obsession was to record in her paintings all the standing totem poles in British Columbia. She travelled to the remote villages on the West Coast of British Columbia to the Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, Gitxsan, and Haida Indians to draw and paint the dense forest and the totem poles. Her paintings of carvings on Haida Gwaii, the Skeena River and islands off northern Vancouver Island are important historical documents of Canada’s Northwest Coast indigenous people and culture.

"The more she entered into the life of the tree, as one breath moving, in and out like the tide, one heart-drum beating, the more alive her work became," Vreeland writes. Carr, whose thought reflected those of the Transcendentalists, wanted to see and paint ideas, not things. Influenced by Walt Whitman, Edvard Munch, the Post Impressionists, Fauvists and Cubists, she responds, "Poor van Gogh" when a critic compares her work to Vincent van Gogh.

Carr never married, was childless, and left no record of lovers, though Vreeland gives us a teasing almost-romance with a French fur trader named Claude. Her closest friend is a Salish basket maker, Sophie Frank, a heartbreaking character victimized by her native culture, superstition, poverty, and the tragic deaths of her babies.

Many dramatic episodes in Carr’s life are omitted, among them Carr’s time in New York, her meeting with Georgia O’Keefe, and her relationship with the American artist, Mark Tobey. Vreeland writes nothing of the time Carr spent 18 months in a sanatorium in England, but gives a mental home experience to a fictionalized character who was abused at the hands of misguided missionary parents. Vreeland makes concessions to capture the spirit of her subject, and for the most part, succeeds with her fine prose of the natural world and her interpretation of Carr’s passion for nature and native culture.

"Deep down," writes Vreeland, "we all hug something. The great forest hugs its silence. The sea air hugs the spilled cries of sea birds." Chapter titles are named for trees, animals or birds, reflecting a moment in the legacy of that creature or thing to make a metaphorical or anthropomorphous statement. Each section produces a surprise package of lush passages, vivid and dense as the Northwest forests and terrain they describe. Carr, who felt God in the spaces between trees, would likely approve.

Constant financial struggle flogged Carr and she was forced to turn her home into a rooming house for an income. Rejected and disillusioned, she abandoned serious painting for nearly 15 years to run her house, raise Old English bobtail sheepdogs, and produce pottery for tourists. Then in 1927, the National Gallery of Canada organized an exhibition to include 26 of Carr's works. She met Lawren Harris and members of the famous Group of Seven who encouraged and inspired her to keep painting. Today the name and the art of Emily Carr is legendary, and in The Forest Lover, Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue and The Passion of Artemisia, gives us a truth-seeking Emily Carr in a background of monumental and fearsome beauty.