Klee Wyck

It's a little unfortunate that most Victorians think only of the annoying whale mascot from the 1994 commonwealth games when they hear the name "Klee Wyck", because the real "Klee Wyck" was Emily Carr. It was a name given to her by the natives of Ucluelet and it means "laughing one". I'd guess that the whale mascot was intended as a nod to her, but the gesture fell a little flat.

I've loved Emily Carr's paintings since the first time I saw them. One of my old babysitters did work with the Victoria Art Gallery and she took my sister and I there once to see the exhibits. I had thought I liked art, but I found that most of what was on display didn't interest me at all. I thought a lot of the art was boring, some of it not really art at all, and a lot of it just blurred together in the sheer number of paintings I was seeing all at once. It wasn't until I walked into the Carr exhibit that I actually started to think that perhaps I could appreciate art after all.

Looking back, I have a tough time remembering exactly what struck me first about her paintings, but I know what strikes me as I see her work now. Her brush strokes were decisive and strong, her colours bold and somehow realistic, even when they weren't true to life. More than that though, it was her subjects. I knew the landscapes she painted, I'd seen totem poles and cedars, and I loved them. The way I felt when I saw treetops stretching up to the sky was the way I felt when I saw a painting she'd done of it.



It wasn't until much later (after I'd already moved into my own apartment and put three of her prints on my walls) that I thought to actually learn about her as a person. Oh, I'd known that she'd lived in Victoria and was considered ahead of her time, I'd walked past "Carr House" many times, but I think I had somehow felt that I didn't want to risk spoiling her paintings by finding out that the person behind them wasn't as wonderful as those works suggested.

I shouldn't have worried. I was poking around the museum gift shop with some visiting family when I noticed a book titled "Klee Wyck". I picked it up and was shocked to discover that Emily Carr hadn't just been a painter, she'd been a writer. I bought the book, took it home and devoured it. I couldn't believe that the emotions of her paintings could be distilled into words, but she had done it. I've since read three more of her books (and I'm working on a fourth) and I love them.

Emily was best described as an eccentric. She was a female artist who traveled the world in a time when women were expected to stay home. She studied art in the wicked city of San Francisco, spent time in an English sanatorium for "hysteria" and explored the remote and largely abandoned native villages of BC's west coast. She was stubborn and impatient and she saw the world through very different eyes. In her later years, she kept all the chairs in her studio winched up on ropes attached to the ceiling. When visitors called she would leave them standing until she decided if they were worth her time or not. If she liked you, she'd lower a chair.

Emily Carr summed up her approach to writing and painting very simply: "I did not know book rules. I made two for myself. They were about the same as the principles I use in painting--get to the point as directly as you can; never use a big word if a little one will do."

I've taken a couple of excerpts from the stories of Klee Wyck. If you should go looking for the book to read it yourself, make sure you find the newer edition. The older edition was edited for mass consumption in schools and quite a bit of it was made politically correct or removed entirely.

On totems:
"They were in a long straggling row the entire length of the bay and pointed this way and that; but no matter how drunken their tilt, the Haida poles never lost their dignity. They looked sadder, perhaps, when they bowed forward and more stern when they tipped back. They were bleached to a pinkish silver colour and cracked by the sun, but nothing could make them mean or poor, because the Indians had put strong thought into them and had believed sincerely in what they were trying to express."


"At five o'clock that July morning the sea, sky, and beach of Skidegate were rosily smoothed into one. There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth, as much to sleeping as waking as I went stumbling over the Skidegate sands."

And this, which is probably my favourite passage:

"As the canoe glided on, her human cargo was as silent as the cedar-life that once had filled her. She had done with the forest now; when they shoved her into the sea they had dug out her heart. Submissively she accepted the new element, going with the tide. When tide or wind crossed her she became fractious. Some still element of the forest clung yet to the cedar's hollow rind which resented the restless push of waves."