Emily Carr and Mavis Ehlert: Fine one-woman shows

Art
Emily Carr and Mavis Ehlert:
Fine one-woman shows
By Carol Mills

Emily Carr is not one of my favourite Canadian personalities. Her autobiography and the anecdotes about her, reveal a strong and proud ego.
Her expressed ideas are a strange mixture of simple acknowledgement of the trends of contemporary art, and an evolving doctrine of her own private sense of integrity. In this sense she is pragmatic.
But she is also the visionary and at times her words echo the strength of her finest canvases.
..It is full of moving light moving over the different planes of the interlocked branches. There are great sweeping directions of line. Its feeling, its colour, its depth, its smell, its smell and sounds and silences are bound together into one great thing and its unfathomable centre is its soul. That is what we are trying to get at, to express; that is the thing that matters, the very essence of it.
An opinionated and passionate romantic could not foresee that keeping a boarding house would curb her painting for nearly 15 years. She showed an almost sentimental interest in the West coast Indians and their environment.
Her work as a student is conservative. The “wood interior” could easily serve as a storybook illustration, and the studies of Indian longhouses are not far removed in spirit from 19th C. paintings made for anthropological interest.
In this role she is hardly a satisfying artist. The “yan mortuary poles” of 1912, is pretty and nostalgic with pink flowers and weathered wood.
The sentimentalism is to creep in later in her writing, but her painting is to escape its bounds, for the sentimentalism is to become a finer lyricism.
“Forest Clearing” (1933-1935) and “Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky” (1936) display similarly thin paint with delicate lines, reminiscent of those early watercolours. There is neither timidity nor formality, despite the ‘literary’ title of the latter.
We can thus link the beginnings and the conclusion of her intent in the roots of a patriotic sentimental vision.
From 1927 to 1928, Emily Carr did little painting but it does not seem to have been detrimental to her overall work. Look at “totem poles”, “Kiteukia” (1912) and “Kitwancool totems” (1928). No longer do we observe the totems, we are among them. No longer are the totems subordinate to the contemporary style. They have assumed their own mass and emanate the light of their own mystery.
“The Totem and Forest” (1931) is in the nature of confrontation. The painting carries its own sense of imminence.
Object and mystery is important to her. The most radical conjunction is “Grey” (1931). It is both structural steel and organic form.
“Vanquished” is reminiscent of a Lauren Harris painting. At the time, her correspondence with him maintained the confidence she lacked, in spite of the appearance of independence and courage in the face of isolation.
Emily Carr’s art is not unduly personal. The myth of Canada is still undergoing creation.
We contribute by acknowledging the conditions of this land and our society.
Emily Carr’s acknowledgement is more profound. She lacked the sense of propaganda.
She could accept realities, artistic or social, erring only by underestimating her own creative capacities.
These paintings belong to the first half of the century when Canadians were waking up to Canada. They complement the Group of Seven and native art.

Mavis Ehlert
It is unfair to only consider the work of those artists who are well documented and whose stories are distant enough from our own lives that we can be objective.
Besides Emily Carr, the Art Gallery of Hamilton is showing the work of Mavis Ehlert. If you like the sculpture outside the Football Hall of Fame, you are not likely to enjoy these.
They are conservative and graceful figure studies for the most part. They gain in their contrast with the Emily Carr exhibit.
We might overlook these pieces in an atmosphere saturated with paintings or sculpture that complies with one aesthetic or another. But, here the blatant forcefulness of Carr’s paintings draws attention to the elegance of some of these figures. It is not often that we are able to refresh our vision for both styles in this way. The two displays are a mutual pleasure.