Arnold, Grant. “An Interview With Landon Mackenzie.” Included in exhibition catalogue for Emily Carr and Landon Mackenzie: Wood Chopper and the Monkey at The Vancouver Art Gallery, 2014-2015. Pages 31-35

GRANT ARNOLD: Why were you interested in doing an exhibition of your work in combination with paintings by Emily Carr?

LANDON MACKENZIE: I was interested in exhibiting my work in dialogue with Emily Carr’s because I felt that it would provide a way for me to formalize my knowledge of Carr, her work and her life-as well as to historicize my own journey and to combine thirty of her best works and twenty of mine into a straight-ahead show (which, by the way, at the start of my career and in Carr’s time would have been called a “two-man show”).

There are so many differences between the two of us—mainly because our lives and careers have spanned very different time periods (she was born 1871 and I in 1954). One hundred and six years separate the earliest Carr work—a small watercolour from 1908—and the most recent painting of mine, Big Pink Sky (TB) from 2014. I’m interested in the differences in our practices but also in the parallels.

When you approached me to do the exhibition, I immediately said that I wanted “to focus on the work Carr did when she was old.” Then I went back to the studio, did the math, and realized that she was my age when she made many of these great paintings (at least she was in 1930, at age fifty-nine). That was a shock! The majority of the Carr works I’ve chosen are about the forest and were made during the early 1930s.

You’ve said that many of the paintings Carr made in the studio after 1929 are particularly remarkable. Can you elaborate on this?

There is no doubt that Carr’s years of close observation-working in situ, being inspired by First Nations cultures and imagery-and the development of her skills in both drawing and painting were necessary for the flood of creativity that came later. Her exposure to other artists and newer ideas about making pictures was critical too. By 1928 her paintings were no longer based solely on direct observation, but were resolved in the context of the studio and the process of painting. Many images from this time are quite magical.

Why did you want to include the term “Wood Chopper” in the title?

I like the term, and a wood chopper selects a tree, clears a path, makes firewood to stay warm and is an expert at reshaping the forest. For me, Carr is a wood chopper. She cleared a path that made it possible for my generation to have the careers that we do. And she has shaped a vision of the coastal forest in many imaginations. My painting Woodchopper and Paradigm (Canadian Shield and Target Series) (1990) shows a cartoon-like nude with a tool belt who is bringing her axe down on this impossibly large fallen tree, at the very spot where there is a big knot. The figure is based on me, from when I was a life model in 1973 while an art student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. And the pose is from my experience living in the bush in the Yukon-particularly during the summer of 1976. The term “wood chopper” reads as male and so does “painter.” Though we experienced it differently in our respective time periods, we both encountered pervasively sexist conceptions of the role of “painter.”

Why “the Monkey”?

In researching Carr I have become obsessed with her relationship to this small creature whom she loved as a kind of daughter. She had many close relationships with animals, but her bond with the wee Javanese monkey she named Woo—for the sound of its cries—is very special. Carr’s writings include descriptions of various dresses, from red flannel to pinafores, that Carr made for Woo over the years (at first just to keep her warm in the damp, cold Victoria winters). There are passages narrating walks with a baby carriage, which Carr used to carry supplies, and delightful reports of the monkey’s toddler-like mischief.

I made the duplicate of Carr’s 1932 painting Woo by imitating her pictorial vocabulary; for example, using the same height and oil brushwork. I repeated the yellow dress of the original, as I was affected by Carr’s story of Woo eating the yellow paint (as well as blue and green). It led me to start with a yellow undercoat on the canvas, which was a conceptual idea, but my version looks a little sadder than the original 1932 painting, as I was aware that Carr and Woo would eventually be parted after many years together.

The fact that I made a close “copy” raises questions around “homage” versus copy, adaptation versus appropriation. It calls to mind Carr’s admiration for First Nations carvers and the inspiration they provided for many of her paintings, thus pointing to the debates surrounding Carr’s relationship with First Nations cultures.

In 1990 the Vancouver Art Gallery held a special seminar on Emily Carr at which a group of art historians, curators and artists-including you-were invited to consider Carr scholarship within the museum. Did that influence your thinking about Carr?

Yes, for sure. We met over a weekend and tossed around many points and perspectives. Most of the historians and curators are still among the “who’s who” of Carr scholars, including Gerta Moray and lan Thom. In cases where invitees couldn’t come, such as Marcia Crosby or Ann Morrison, their papers were presented in absentia. Of the ten or so “experts,” three were artists, but I was the only painter. It was a good format because with no audience to “perform” for, speculation was encouraged and dialogue was opened. During two intense days we hashed out many aspects of Carr as an artist and a woman from a Victorian society. We interrogated what her art means in the service of nationalism and all sorts of questions and concerns about her methods and content. A partial transcript of the seminar was published in Collapse: The View From Here in 1996.

Carr has been characterized as an eccentric, and details of her unconventional life are often used to locate her within a nationalist narrative as a kind of “feminine other” to the Group of Seven. Do you think this has been detrimental to recognition of Carr as an exceptional artist?

When I arrived in Vancouver to teach at the art school in the mid-1980s, Carr was dismissed by many of my colleagues as a crazy old kook. As Gerta Moray has reminded me: “Her image had become a cliché, in order to make her into a tourist attraction.” No one discussed Carr’s work for its strength or thought of her accomplishments, and most resented the name of the institution being changed from the former Vancouver School of Art to the Emily Carr College (now University) of Art and Design a few years before.

Biographies of artists often cause trouble, but when applied to women’s lives they can be particularly pernicious. With Carr’s paintings now being highly regarded and taken seriously—as demonstrated by her recent inclusion in DOCUMENTA (13) in Germany or her show this fall at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, UK—I hope we can afford to look again at aspects of her life without losing track of her art.

You’ve expressed admiration for Carr’s commitment to art making and her perseverance in the face of difficult circumstances, especially the problems with her mental and physical health and her isolation in Victoria. Can you say a bit more about that?

It’s no wonder she had the nervous system crisis, or “breakdown,” when she was a young woman in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Having suffered a complicated illness myself for a few years, I am sympathetic. Imagine Carr far from home, starting out in a huge and complex city. She learns that her brother Dick has died after a long struggle with tuberculosis, triggering renewed feelings of abandonment that stem from her mother’s long illness and the premature death of both of her parents—all while coping with the pressures of starting her classes at the Westminster School of Art. She has reduced mobility due to a childhood injury to her foot that leads to her toe being (poorly) amputated. Despite these hardships, for the first two years she remains resilient and does pretty well, but then she moves outside of London for further studies. By 1902 she has suffered eight months of severe headaches and other symptoms that arise as her health deteriorates. Carr reports that she fainted and has fallen down a flight of stairs. By 1903 she is confined to the East Anglia Sanatorium for at least fifteen months—which to me is a pretty strange place if she doesn’t have contagious tuberculosis—and given experimental “treatments” for “hysteria” that involve electricity, along with being force-fed then starved, all the while being forbidden to paint.

Furthermore, some of her symptoms fit with new theories about migraines and the paints she used around 1900 contained far more toxic metals than the ones we use today. These included cobalt, mercury, lead and high loads of cadmium that could pass through the skin and enter the bloodstream when mixed with turpentine. We rarely use that solvent today and not

without protection. So there’s a good chance that heavy metals compromised her sensitive

nervous system on top of everything else. Add depression and fear of disappointing her sisters, who were using their scarce financial resources so she could study art abroad. It was a tough period for her! In Victoria she was very much isolated with no audience or emotionally supportive art community. Later in her life I think she painted her way out of loneliness by creating in pictures places of her own—part real and part fictitious—that she realized to meet her own needs. I admire how she kept going despite her poverty, the difficulty in getting or affording supplies and rarely selling any work. And that despite these constraints she still made a remarkable body of work in pictures and words.

There’s a reference to tuberculosis in the title of Big Pink Sky (TB), which you produced for this exhibition. What was your thinking when you painted this work?

I was thinking of the colour and shape of trauma and illness, and wanted to find a way to represent that. Carr lost her mother to tuberculosis—which is referenced in the work title by its shorthand, “TB”—when she was fourteen and her father succumbed to a lung disease soon after. Her mother lost three infant sons before Carr was born and her brother died in a California TB sanatorium in 1899. These hardships are compounded by her long-standing friendship with Sophie Frank, who lost several of her twenty (or twenty-one—as accounts vary) children to TB. There was a lot of death around her.

I also had in mind how the backdrop to the abandoned villages Carr sketched and painted was the appalling smallpox epidemic of 1862 to 1863 that killed half of the Indigenous people in the coastal communities of British Columbia (which devastated Haida Gwaii in particular). This happened only a few years before Carr was born.

These are some of the things I was thinking of while working on the picture. At first it seems like a fun pink painting— until one looks closer.