How Emily Carr showed the world it's never too late for a career in art
She's a Canadian icon, but her career didn't take off until she was 57 years old. Hear how CBC Radio remembered the life of Emily Carr, one of art's most loved late-bloomers, on this day in 1963.
Now, she's a Canadian icon. But Emily Carr was 57 when the country finally noticed her talent.
On March 2, 1945, the painter Emily Carr died in her hometown of Victoria, BC. On the 18th anniversary of her death, CBC Radio remembered the life of an icon with this special report. Now, as it was all those years ago, Carr is considered among the most notable figures in Canadian art, one of the first painters in the country to embrace a Modernist style. But recognition and acclaim was something Carr only enjoyed late in life, a fact that's explored in this 1963 broadcast, which features an interview with one of the reclusive artist's first early supporters, and friends, A.Y. Jackson of the Group of Seven.
Here's how CBC Radio remembered Emily Carr on this day, 53 years ago…
"Emily Carr made an unforgettable impression on everyone who met her or saw her paintings, with some exceptions in her own province," said CBC Radio host Pat Patterson.
"Her old Chinese gardener, her laundry man and her vegetable man: these were the ones who said, 'I like to look at your pictures,'" one friend told CBC.
"Her own contemporaries in Victoria said, 'We can't understand them.'"
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"She just lived her own life, and she didn't bother other people. She really felt that people were not only unkind and unsympathetic and unappreciated, but I mean nobody appreciated her."
"She was just working and working and working and not getting any place. So that it was pretty discouraging."
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"Though Emily Carr may have been discouraged in her isolation, she never stopped working. AY Jackson, member of the Group of Seven painters, whom she met late in life, says that she couldn't always paint, though she was always busy."
Said Jackson: "She never had any contacts out there at all. There were no artists out 'round Vancouver of any account."
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"She'd been working alone for years. And she couldn't sell her work and she had to make rugs and do pottery and all kinds of things to make a living. She even raised sheepdogs, wasting all her time running a boarding house."
Things changed for Carr when she was included in an exhibition of West Coast aboriginal art at the National Gallery in Ottawa, a show that travelled to Montreal and Toronto.
As Jackson told CBC Radio: "After she came to Toronto and work was in this exhibition, received a lot of attention, she went back to Victoria, she was sure of herself then."
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"Think of it, when she came down in 1927 she was 56 years old, and it was from that time on she did her finest work."
"Her canvases were bigger and freer and it was so much easier for her to carry on because she had some backing. And she had friends!"
Listen to the complete story:
For more throwbacks like this, visit the CBC Digital Archives.