Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Emily Carr & Jack Shadbolt: Heart of Darkness

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Emily Carr & Jack Shadbolt: Heart of Darkness

by John McGee

Emily Carr, untitled, 1935-8, oil on cardboard (Photos: John McGee)

Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas and other well-known contemporary artists hail from Vancouver. But try to name a famous modernist from the coastal capital. Perhaps only Canadians will hit on Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt. Considered to be among British Columbia's greatest artists, the two helped introduce European and American modernism to Canada's West Coast and defined a unique regional variant. This modest exhibition from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia displays a small range of work by each. 

Carr (1871-1945) is the Georgia O'Keefe of Canada. Rather than the desert of the American Southwest, she captured the dense rainforests and manic-depressive skies of the Pacific Northwest. Though Carr studied art in San Francisco, London and Paris, she always returned to, and eventually settled in, the Vancouver area. 

Jack Shadbolt, White Dove Cleaners 
from "The Occupation of Point Grey 
Series," 1942, graphite on paper, 
74.5x59cm

At various times throughout her life, Carr visited the villages of the First Nations (Native Americans) living around her native Vancouver Island to sketch. The artwork resulting from these trips received little initial attention, and Carr eventually went into artistic hibernation, running a boarding house for many years. Then, in 1927, the influential Group of Seven painters recognized her for her unique view of the West Coast, and she resumed painting with renewed vigor. She finally achieved acclaim not only as a painter but as a writer late in her life. 

Carr's five landscape paintings in this show are from the 1930s. Trees and hills are built up with wavy, expressionist horizontal bands of color. In Plumed Firs (c.1939), the brown and green hills sweep into the swirling blue and gray sky in one motion. In Forest Interior (1932), slender maroon trunks jut like masts through roiling waves of green foliage. 

In her work, Carr documents as much as mythologizes the land. Even in the '30s, logging had bitten ugly chunks from the thick green mat of cedars and firs that once covered much of coastal British Columbia. The clearcuts depicted in Plumed Firs and Wasteland may not shock now, but in their time such concerns were virtually unknown to the general public. 

Like Carr, Jack Shadbolt (1909-1989) thought that the contemporary art of the West Coast needed to be connected with the indigenous arts and local landscape. Motifs in Shadbolt's early Indian Totems (1938) may reinforce certain stereotypes of “Northwest art,” but his interest in the abstractions of New York School painters helped him produce more than gift shop trinkets. African shields and masks in Jesting Grasses (1953-54), for example, reference similar efforts by Picasso. Other works recall the mytho-psychological forces of Pollock's pre-paint flinging canvases.

Emily Carr, Wasteland, c. 1938, oil on canvas, 102.9x98cm 

During World War II, Shadbolt worked in the War Records Office cataloging photos of death camps. That experience seems to have sparked his most powerful work here, "The Occupation of Point Grey," a series of four graphite drawings he made in 1942. These chilling sketches depict the aftermath of what looks like a gas attack in a quiet, affluent Vancouver suburb. A sprawled figure lying in the doorway of “White Dove Cleaners” might pass for a passed-out homeless guy except for the two bombers veering off overhead. 

Both Shadbolt's images of the horrors of war and Carr's of environmental degradation continue to be poignant. They also reveal that, though Vancouver may always have more trees than artists, its cultural history cuts deeper than a chainsaw.

This exhibition was held Jan-Feb 2003 at the Canadian Embassy Gallery in Akasaka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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