Seven Journeys: The Sketchbooks of Emily Carr

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Recent recognition of Emily Carr in an international context (Carr,
O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own, 2000) suggests that the
extensive literature about her can still be augmented. Doris Shadbolt,
art historian, curator, Carr scholar—The Art of Emily Carr (1992) and
Emily Carr (1990)—continues her previous studies with this
re-examination of 13 sketchbooks, part of the Carr holdings at the
British Columbia Archives in Victoria, the largest repository of primary
records by and about Emily Carr.

The sketchbooks date from December 1927 through the summer of 1930, a
period when Carr made a number of excursions—the “seven journeys”
of the title—to gather visual material about Native culture for her
paintings. The first of these was actually to Ottawa in 1927 to attend
the exhibition Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern, where she had
been invited to exhibit. While in the east, she also made sketches of
Native art in the National Museum of Canada, and recorded her reaction
to the works of the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Returning to the West Coast, she travelled to the Skeena and Nass
Rivers, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Nootka, Friendly Cove, Port
Renfrew, and the villages of Quatsino Sound. Only a fraction of all the
sketches produced are included here, but they document the way Carr
worked, the visual notes she made, and what she saw in the Native
villages. Shadbolt guides us through the sketchbooks, relating the
images to the specific journeys and locales and sometimes to the
paintings whose sources can be traced here. On the evidence of the
sketchbooks, she notes that these years were critical to the development
of Carr’s later work.

Shadbolt’s text and the many fine sketches reproduced in
black-and-white illuminate three prolific years in Carr’s life, a time
when her artistic energies were recharged by the honour of the Ottawa
exhibition and her subsequent first-hand observations of Native art in
its environment. Seven Journeys is a valuable addition to the literature
on Emily Carr.