Emily Carr, the Brush that Rises

One

A tall vertical surface.

A forest.

The trees stand straight.
Very high.

They go to the top of the surface and are cut off there.
The ends are not visible.

The thickness of a trunk is nearly the same top and bottom.
They are not trees thick below and thin above.

They are like columns.

The color is green.
But not a bright green.

Green with blue running through it, green with black running through it.
A wet green.

Below it is dark.
Almost black.

The floor is not visible.

Above it is bright.
Between the trees the sky is seen in pieces.

Those pieces are not joined.
Each is separate.

Look at the brushwork.

It swept up and down.
There is almost nowhere it went side to side.

It swept once and then swept the next.
The same direction repeats.

The paint is thin.

Unlike the last two chapters.
It is not stacked paint.

There are places where it ran.
Because it was thinned before use.

It is paint that dries fast.

The sky flows as well.

The rhythm of the trees carries up into the sky.
The sky turns in a spiral.

The background does not hold still.

Two

Emily Carr was born in 1871 on the west coast of Canada.

In Victoria, British Columbia.
A city on an island.

The family had come from England.

She lost her parents young.
She was raised by her older sisters.

She went far away to learn painting.

First to San Francisco and then to London.
She stayed some years.

Later she went to Paris as well.

There she saw new painting.
She learned how to use color strongly.

She came back.

And she took a boat along the northern coast.

There were Indigenous villages there.

Wooden posts stood in front of the villages.
Figures of people and animals were carved into them.

She painted them.

Over several years she went to many villages.

She believed those posts were disappearing.
So she tried to record them.

Care is needed here.

Those posts were not hers.

They belonged to other people, and to them they held a meaning heavier than painting.

There is no reason to think ill of her wish to record.
But whether that was her fūdo is a separate matter.

This ground is still under discussion.

This book does not rule on it.
It only sets it down.

There are cases of living in the same land and painting another people's form.

After that she put painting aside for a long time.

Nearly fifteen years.

She ran a boarding house.
She cleaned rooms and collected rent and raised dogs.

The paintings did not sell and no one recognized them.

She lived that way past fifty.

In 1927 she met painters from the east.

They were people who wanted to paint the land of Canada.
One of them saw her painting and recognized it.

She was fifty-six then.

She began painting again.

And in the ten and some years remaining, all her major work came out.

She went into the forest.

She hauled a small caravan and stayed for days at a time.
With a dog and a monkey.

She painted there.

She thinned oil paint with gasoline and painted on paper.

Paint was expensive and paper was cheap.
And thinned paint dries fast.

It suited painting outdoors.

Late in life she also wrote.
She was given a prize for the writing.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

In a forest of much rain the line goes up.

The coast of British Columbia has much rain.
It is temperate rainforest.

The trees of that forest are very high and straight.

Why.

Because the light is only above.

Where trees are dense, light does not come below.
So they go up.

There is no room to reach sideways.

Rising straight is the form of that forest.

In the Prologue we saw the trees of Jeju.
Trees that lie to one side because of wind.

Here it is the reverse.
Trees that stand straight because of light.

Wind lays down and light raises up.

Then the direction of the surface is set.

Vertical.

And the brushwork becomes vertical too.

Three things follow.

First, material sets speed.

The question of this part is answered most directly here.

She thinned oil paint with gasoline.

Thinned paint dries fast.
Drying fast, it cannot be worked long.

So the stroke has to go down in one pass.

And thinned paint lets the brush run.
There is little resistance.

One can sweep fast.

Thick paint holds the brush.
Thin paint pushes it along.

The brush of Kiefer, whom we will see later, is heavy and hers is light.

Material set the speed, and speed set the form.

She chose this material at first because of money.
And the material fitted that forest.

Poverty happened to be right.

Second, direction makes rhythm.

Draw many times in the same direction and rhythm appears.

Once is a stroke and ten times is a rhythm.

On her surface the trees are not counted one by one.
Many of them are bound into one flow.

That is how a forest looks to begin with.

One does not see each tree; the whole arrives at once.

Third, the background follows the form.

The sky turns in a spiral.

The upward movement of the trees passes over into the sky.

This is not observation but extension.

In a forest the sky is seen only in pieces.
It is seen through the gaps between branches.

Then the sky becomes several forms rather than a wide background.

In the last part O'Keeffe's sky became a plane.
Here the sky becomes pieces.

On dry ground the sky is one sheet, and in a forest the sky is many pieces.

The land sets the shape of the sky.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

First look at what is alike.

Both began again late.

Emily Carr took up the brush again at fifty-six.
Byun Shi-Ji went to the island at forty-nine.

Both were already painters before that.
For both, the painting before and the painting after are not the same.

And for both, the major work came late.

In work that comes late there is no hurry.

Knowing the time left is short, they still do not rush.
Because they already know it is not a thing that hurrying helps.

There is a second likeness.

Both went about alone.

Emily Carr hauled a caravan into the forest.
Byun Shi-Ji walked the island.

Stay alone a long time and human speech grows less.
Then the speech of things is heard.

There is a third likeness.

Both touched a community that had vanished.

Emily Carr painted the posts of Indigenous villages.
On Byun Shi-Ji's surface there are those who did not return.

The island once lost many people.
That event is called 4·3.

The painter spoke of those years in the oral history.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 241–243)

But the position of the two differs.

Emily Carr looked from outside.
She recorded another people's loss.

Byun Shi-Ji was inside.
He mourned the loss of his own community.

Recording and mourning are not the same.

Recording tries to preserve.
Mourning tries to observe.

Recording must be accurate and mourning must be quiet.

In the last part we divided fūdo from biography.
What many undergo together and what one person undergoes.

Here a different line is needed.

The case where many underwent it and I do not belong to that many.

What is a painting made then.

Honestly, this book has no answer.

Only that the two paintings can be seen to have come out differently.

On the surface that paints the posts, the posts stand facing front.
They were painted to be seen well.

On the surface that paints the old man, he shows his back or lowers his head.
He was painted not to be seen well.

A painting that shows and a painting that covers.

Now look at the difference.

The largest difference is direction.

Emily Carr's line goes up.
Byun Shi-Ji's line lies sideways.

The line of a forest and the line of a field.

Where trees grow high, the vertical is the master.
Where trees cannot grow, the horizontal is the master.

On Jeju the trees lie down in the wind.

So the longest line on the surface is the horizon.

That one line where sea and sky meet.

A surface ruled by the vertical makes one look up.
A surface ruled by the horizontal makes one look far.

Looking up means there is something above.
Looking far means there is something over there.

The forest points at the sky and the island points at the horizon.

The sky cannot be reached and the horizon cannot be reached either.

Both paintings point at what cannot be reached.
Only the direction of the pointing differs.

The sky differs too.

Emily Carr's sky turns in a spiral.
It moves.

Byun Shi-Ji's sky is empty.
It does not move.

In a forest the trees sway, so the sky looks as though it sways.
In an empty field there is nothing to sway, so the sky holds still.

The sky where the wind is stronger is the quieter one.

Strange to say, but so it is.

Where the wind is strong, everything that could sway is already lying down.

Five

In the forest one looks up.

The trees go up and the sky is seen in pieces.
The pieces move.

The neck aches.

On a distant island one looks ahead.

There is the horizon and above it nothing.
One small boat floats.

The neck does not ache.

One looks up and the other looks straight across.

Both stood for a long time.

The brush went up in one place and sideways in the other.

The land set the direction.