As the crow flies

Emily Carr (1871-1945), age 16, and her pet crow.

The crow sits on the girl’s arm. It’s an old photograph, not quite in focus; the girl isn’t looking at the camera and neither is the crow. The photo was taken in 1887, and the girl is Emily Carr, aged 16.

I’ve been working on a project about Emily Carr recently. My office wall is tiled with copies of her paintings cut from a calendar, and my shelves have filled with biographies, exhibition catalogues and art books alongside her published diaries and stories. Because, as well as being an iconic early twentieth-century artist, Carr was an award-winning author. Her memoir Klee Wyck won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction in 1942.

I don’t usually use this column to write about other projects but when I that saw this issue’s theme was Holy Fools, it felt like a perfect fit and I wanted to give you Emily and her trickster pet. Throughout her life, she was an eccentric, a seeker, a troubler, a lonely maker trying to find her own ways to express the glory she glimpsed in her world.

There is no shortcut

A story from her diaries: November 1933.

Lawren Harris, a member of the Group of Seven and pen-pal to Emily, told her about visiting the international art exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair. She imagined “the art of all ages collected together, the old thoughts and the new thoughts hobnobbing on the walls” and decided to see it herself. So Emily set out from Victoria to cross the continent by train, 62 years old and travelling independently, exactly how she liked it. But she miscalculated and arrived in Chicago the day after the exhibition closed.

“I feel like going straight home and bawling,” she wrote. “I’m going to wash and then go up and beat my head on the stone doors of the Art Institute.”

Days later, she penned this more peaceful perspective.

“It doesn’t matter about the pictures really, not a bit. What I am looking for I must work out for myself. It is between God and me. Laziness made me desire to look at the pictures of others, to try and pick up short-cut recipes that others have used to get what they desired to express instead of going straight to the thing itself, to stand before it meek and silent, feeling deeper and deeper and more intensely till its life throbs and vibrates through you, till the inaudible words of the earth, God’s words, speak to you and tell you what to do, how to express it.”

I hear the words of Paul echoing here, just a step behind Emily, telling believers to work out our own salvation “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

That is something the holy fools know. Holiness sits in seeing with your own eyes and expressing what faith you find through the details of your life. There is no shortcut. We are each made in the image of God. The crow flies, the painter paints and we each find our own way to follow where God leads.