Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

I stumbled on Canadian artist Emily Carr earlier this year and had the chance to visit her childhood Victoria BC home — an official historic site — two months ago. I have to confess I’ve kind of fallen in love with her.

Among Canada’s iconic artists of the early 20th-century, she focused on portraying the first nations communities in British Columbia and also the forests and skylines of the Pacific Northwest.

Her life was a struggle. Her parents died when she was a teenager and in her quest to support her art, she bought a house and took in borders, raised English sheep dogs and taught art. She cobbled together the wherewithall to study art in San Francisco, in Britain and in France. She traveled to indigenous villages in Alaska to sketch and paint.

She was also a skilled author and among her works is a charming book about her life with her dogs. I have become so entranced by her steady determination to continue with her art despite challenges that I bought three of her books, the one pictured here; a collection of her sketchwork that informed some of her best-known paintings; and a collection of her journals titled “Hundreds and Thousands,” which I don’t think is available outside of Victoria book shops.

She didn’t settle into painting the sweeping works that made her famous until she was in her 50s. And she was an adventurer at heart. Here are a few lines from a journal describing a day hike outside of Pemberton BC, which she did alone, carrying her painting gear and accompanied by her dog:

Today I went up Harvey Mountain, supposed to have one of those grand views. They said it covered all the peaks. I expected a glorious panorama and to walk five miles. I crossed three railway bridges, beastly things, scuttling over them lugging Tantrum (the dog) and all my gear, counting my steps and reckoning each one aloud to Tantrum. … The mountains glorious, tossing splendour and glory from peak to peak. Yesterday there was fresh snow. They are half white and half navy blue and the beastly treacherous Lillooet River snakes through the willow and meadows. I don’t like these rivers. They are oily smooth and swift but swirling, with mean currents and whirlpools. You feel as if they asked you sneakily and stealthily to fall in and be swallowed, swept away swiftly to nothingness. There is meanness in their muddy green-grey water and shelvy banks. I never go to the rivers about here or want to look at them or hear them.

She hiked that trail in June 1933 when she was 62 years old. I might be wrong about this but I don’t think it was particularly common in that time for women of that age to trundle off into the wilds (and outside of Pemberton BC, north of Wistler, it is the wilds) alone. I like that she didn’t like the rivers, and that she wrote that feeling down.

I wonder what she would make of the fact that one of her paintings, “Crazy Stair,” sold at auction in 2013 for more than $3 million.

I am thinking of her as a guide, someone on a creative path who remained game all her life, despite obstacles. Below is one of her works that speaks to me. She painted what she saw and what she saw on that particular day was a clear cut.