Moray, Gerta. “The View from Nowhere: Landon Mackenzie Spins Emily Carr.” Essay from exhibition catalogue for Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey at The Vancouver Art Gallery, 2014-2015.

“It seems to me that a large part of painting is longing; a fluid movement ahead, a pouring forward to the unknown… Music is full of longing and movement. Painting should be the same.”

— Emily Carr, April 19, 1937, Hundreds and Thousands

In an angry letter reproaching the National Gallery of Canada for buying none of her post-1912 work, Emily Carr famously described herself as “a little old woman on the edge of nowhere.” We have moved on into a decade when Douglas Coupland can announce to the world, from his home base in British Columbia, that “anywhere is everywhere,” and when Carr’s work has been shown around the globe-from London to Kassel to Tokyo. So when leading Vancouver painter Landon Mackenzie was commissioned to select works by Carr and juxtapose them with her own, I was curious to see, as a Carr scholar, what new insights would emerge.

I learned that Mackenzie, long interested in Carr, had done intense reading and looking to prepare for the exhibition. Her selection of Carr’s works, however, remains rigorously intuitive and comes from within the parameters of her own work. Using her artist’s eye, Mackenzie zeroes in on works she considers of the highest calibre. The paintings that have attracted her include both the dark forest paintings from 1928 to 1931 (paintings that have frequently been referred to as disturbing, menacing, heavy, repulsive) and the more popular, lighter-toned, gestural paintings that developed with Carr’s use of oil on paper from 1932 onward. The Carr who emerges in the show is a very strong painter.

Mackenzie clusters the works together according to key visual themes that the two artists have explored, spotlighting how each uses forms as both metaphor and symbol. She dramatizes the common ground she has discovered with three successive room installations, each like a contrasted movement in a symphony.

In the first room the emphasis is on the role of abstraction and symbolism in their landscape imagery. Mackenzie’s early Lost River Series paintings, with their dark layers of twilight colour, their indeterminate, vulnerable animal forms, dim horizons and obscurely glimpsed industrial debris, reveal the dark side of a Canadian landscape that she experienced in her “back to the land” days in the Yukon during the 1970s. This is a landscape that is vast and mysterious,

but scarred by human intrusion. Alongside these, Mackenzie places four dark and powerful paintings Carr made of First Nations village sites and the forest, paintings that have provoked critical mantras on Carr as a romantic voyeur who paints an Aboriginal culture in ruins and an idealized, self-renewing nature. Relocated beside Mackenzie’s Lost River paintings, where the environmentalist subtext is clear, Carr’s works take on an ominously prophetic tone. In both artists’ works the animal presences hover between the literal and the symbolic, acting as human surrogates who invite the viewer to enter into nature as a not fully knowable other.

Mackenzie spotlights an important feature of Carr’s compositions—a low-flying bird’s-eye

viewpoint that hovers above the ground as Carr attempts, in her early watercolours, to encompass the vast scale of the trees in Stanley Park. This detachment from the ground introduces an abstract, conceptual quality that persists into her later images. Mackenzie’s

Lost River paintings are even more spatially abstract. Both artists turn topographies into imaginative worlds. My subtitle for this room would be “dream.”

In the second room Mackenzie introduces some untypical, less well-known pictures that suggest how each artist achieved self-knowledge and expressed deep and frustrating desires. Here is “the monkey” of the show’s title—Carr’s Woo (c. 1932) was tenderly copied as an homage by Mackenzie when she realized the original was unavailable. Woo is one of the animal companions through whom Carr sublimated her desire for children of her own. The “wood chopper” is also present through Mackenzie’s Woodchopper and Paradigm (Canadian Shield

and Target Series) (1990), in which she acts out in paint her frustration with the paradigms of a patriarchal art world as well as the limitations of its feminist critique. The work’s female figure wields her axe against phallic tree trunks in a composition that collides figuration with abstraction: a central black wedge (I immediately think of the threatening vaginal “void”) is Mackenzie’s diagram of a “paradigm” that hovers in space beside the colour stripes that are associated with her teacher, Guido Molinari.

This room celebrates artistic determination and discipline as each artist is seen creating distinctive experimental forms. There are Carr’s charcoal and oil studies that explore the varied

structures of trees as compositional elements, and some of her monumental forest paintings. These appear alongside Mackenzie’s Forest (Circles for Shep and Eli) (2012-14), one of her recent large pattern paintings that sends out an explosion of coloured disks and paint drops from its centre, as though sparks and chips are flying from the axe blow in her nearby Woodchopper painting. There is a dance of visual rhymes between the paintings in this room that commands the viewer to follow their motion—from the columns of Carr’s tree trunks to the cylinders of Mackenzie’s tree trunks, from the dots in Forest (Circles for Shep and Eli) to the circle of Carr’s self-portrait head, and from the arcs and ellipses of the sky and limbs in The

Laughing Bear (1941) and the skirt in Woo II (After Carr) (2014) to the ovals in Mackenzie’s

Cumberland Delta sketches. Beside Mackenzie’s abstract paintings, the abstract qualities in Carr’s—her use of concentric lines and circular movement—become resonant. This room demands to be titled “dance.”

Mackenzie finds points throughout the exhibition to acknowledge Carr’s courage in wrestling with obstacles (and she admits to encountering similar ones): the frequent health breakdowns surely compounded by toxic painting materials, the problems of financing an artist’s vocation, the assumptions about gender that impinge on a female artist’s life. In the corridor connecting the first two rooms such negative forces are specifically evoked in a pair of Mackenzie’s watercolours, Electric (Tangle I) (2008) and Electric (Tangle II) (2014), which explode with chaotic lines and nodes; these are paired with Carr’s oil on paper works, where the artist developed her method of rapid linear brush marks to channel chaotic energies in the flux of tangled growth.

In the third room Mackenzie reveals an extraordinary denouement in Carr’s late work and her own most recent work. My title for this room is “dissolution.” Mackenzie’s paintings are compositions based on the variation and multiplication of certain basic forms—-paint spots, disks, circles, rays, rectangles and triangles.

The triangle, of course, is a key form in Carr’s tree and mountain paintings. Carr’s Grey (1929-30) shows that she had pondered the writings of Jay Hambidge, the influential art theorist who recommended that artists employ the recurring structures found in nature—in crystals and organic forms such as shells and pine cones. In this and other paintings selected for this room, Carr’s stylized tree forms become repeated rhythmic units that multiply like fractals into infinite space. Mackenzie’s triangle works begin in 2012 with small studies where the overlapping triangular units cover the paper; they are painted in such a way that the transparent watercolour medium allows them to float behind or in front of each other. The compositions result from Mackenzie’s intuitive placing of each individual unit so that it has space to breathe and harmonizes with its neighbours, an organic process much like Carr’s description of growth in the woods: “Every seed has sprung up, poked itself up through the rich soil and felt its way into the openest space within its reach, no crowding, taking its share, part of the ‘scheme.’’

In Carr’s mid-1930s canvases and oil on paper works, solid forms dissolve as her repeated brush strokes enact flows of energy in and around the forms she is depicting, creating an ever varied spatial and temporal flow in what she called “organized chaos, with…massing of individuals into groups, space swinging into space, movement meeting movement…borrowing and paying back, a density and immensity that is so obvious in our Western woods.”

If Mackenzie’s paintings are related to woods, then they show a forest now mediated through the synthetic colours and electrical traces of a technological world. Green Triangle (2012-14) is a large abstract painting in which lines and triangles process like electronic signals in front of a dark space that is generated by centrifugal green rays. Two other large canvases evoke skies and, at the same time, the human body. The dark night of North Star/Neurostar (2013) is pierced by forked-lightning-like rays from a star that also carries organic associations—perhaps a strange after-image of blood vessels in the eye or dendrites radiating from a nerve cell. Most haunting of all is Big Pink Sky (TB) (2013-14), its colours culturally coded to denote pleasure and the feminine, and its surface teeming with myriad paint-drip stars. At first sight the pink densities evoke galaxies, but when seen up close they coagulate into ribbons of internal body tissue, sputum, pustules and splashes of blood. This is the only one of the large paintings that Mackenzie has completed specifically for the exhibition—her meditation on the inescapable presence of tuberculosis and smallpox in the lives of both Carr and her Aboriginal contemporaries. In front of this painting the viewer’s response switches between surrendering to the embrace of intense and pleasurable colour, and focusing on an overwhelming density of organic detail that must be visually and emotionally assimilated.

As Wood Chopper and the Monkey reveals, at a mature stage of life both Carr and Mackenzie arrived at a procedurally similar painting method. Both break down form into units that they can choreograph in significant ways to set up a counterpoint of order and entropy, geometry and formlessness, containment and abandon. They create paintings that extend by implication into a continuum of infinite space. Each of them takes on the challenge of an area of imagery culturally pressing in their time, but not yet emotionally assimilated through visual art. For Carr, this was a habitat that was new to European settlers—one that was more vast and threatening than the picturesque or domesticated landscapes they had left behind. For Mackenzie, it is the human nervous system and a material world that has been made strange by technology’s power to penetrate from the subatomic to the cosmic level, at microscopic and astronomic scales.

Whether through imagery of landscape or the body, each artist’s work acknowledges human finiteness, fragility and mortality. Both artists have created an ultima maniera that confronts the final dissolution of matter and brings into consciousness its deep implications. Each harnesses the resources of painting and abstraction to clothe these frightening realities with love, through the life-giving pleasure of colour and an attunement to the patterns and rhythms of the material world as registered by the human senses. Each has seemingly experienced that “oceanic feeling” that eluded Sigmund Freud when brought to his attention by poet Romain Rolland. It is partly for this reason that their work holds such a wide and lasting appeal.