Emily Carr

In 1912 Emily Carr had studied painting in San Francisco and England and France. She had exhibited her paintings. She had gone on sketching trips to northern British Columbia and lived with the First Nations people and painted their homes and art. She had gone to the government of British Columbia and proposed that she be employed in documenting the art and lifestyles of the First Nations peoples, which she (like most white people at the time) believed would soon cease to exist.

The government turned her down. The samples of art she had submitted were too "artistic", not realistic enough for a documentary project. However, they didn't hire anyone else to do it either.

Carr had a studio in Vancouver. She had worked for one month teaching art, but her students disliked her and she quit. Her studio did not make enough to support itself. She closed it and moved back to Victoria where her sisters lived. She opened a boarding house.

She didn't paint for 15 years.

That isn't entirely true. It wasn't, actually, fifteen full years before she was "rediscovered" by the Canadian art world. And during those years, she painted some local scenes. There's a self-portrait of her from this time, in which she is painting. She sent some of her work to exhibitions. But that's how she saw it - she had ceased to paint. And that's how it feels, that's how you think of your life. The narrative doesn't always match reality - but the narrative is what's important.

They can't have been entirely joyless years. She came up with nicknames for her boarding house and her lodgers. She worked in other mediums. She took up pottery and dog breeding. She was near her family. Biographies of her skip over this as a "depressing" period of "domestic drudgery", but it was fifteen years of her life.

In the late 1920s, when she was 57, she started to paint again. Canadian artistic tastes had changed, and people came to visit her to see her works, and her paintings were exhibited and sold. She travelled back up north to find source material. She invented new ways of sketching. She became very concerned about the impact of industry on the environment, and put that into her paintings.

She went fifteen years without painting, and then she started painting again.