Word: carres
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When Emily Carr's money ran out, she returned to teach art in Victoria. But no one wanted to learn from her; it was generally agreed that the home town girl had not made good and that her paintings were simply terrible. To support herself, she opened a boarding house, raised puppies and made pottery and hooked rugs for sale on the side...
Soon the defiantly avant-garde Emily Carr of youth was transformed into a dumpy, frumpy, acidulous old maid. She would plod the staid streets of Victoria with a monkey on her shoulder and a mangy sheep dog at her heels, pushing a baby carriage full of groceries, while neighbors sneered, smirked, winced, howled or froze with disdain...
...Indians, in their fishing villages north of Victoria, knew an entirely different woman. They called Emily Carr "The Laughing One." Whenever she could get away from Victoria she appeared among them to paint pictures of their harsh hushed land and works. "It must be understood, she wrote in old age, "that my collection of Indian pictures was not done in a comfortable studio. You have got to go out and wrestle with the elements, with all your senses alert . . . You have got to hold your nose against the smell of rotten fish, and you've got to have...
...fervently distilling such experiences in her paintings, Emily Carr made her outwardly shabby life an inner triumph. By the time of her death in 1945 she ranked among the foremost painters of the Western Hemisphere. But clearly for her the prize was in the struggle and not in success. For her the Indian world mattered a lot more than the art world...
This week in Ottawa, the National Gallery opened a small show of Emily Carr's oils and watercolors. Her Blunden Harbor (opposite) exemplifies as well as any one painting can the great strength and strangeness that is in all her best work...