Growing pains: an autobiography

Completed just before just before her death in 1945, Growing Pains is Emily Carr's carefully-crafted portrait of an artist: her girlhood in Victoria, B.C.; her training as a painter; the initial rejection and eventual acceptance of her painting by the Canadian people. This autobiographical collection is invaluable for revealing the face she wanted to show the world and the rich texture of her life. Emily Carr (1871-1945), born to a provincial, religiously conservative family in western Canada, became an artist through her unflagging devotion, despite penury, illness, and scorn. She was at once shy, frail, and fearless. She enjoyed late life recognition and rewards, then age and infirmity put an end to her forest treks to paint, and she wrote a few wonderful books. Here she describes drawing from a live model for the first time: "I had dreaded this moment....Her live beauty swallowed up every bit of my shyness. I had never been taught to think of our naked bodies as something beautiful, only as something indecent....Here was nothing but loveliness-- a glad, life-lit body, a woman proud of her profession, proud of her shapely self, regal, illuminated, high-poised above our clothed insignificance." Through the decades in her autobiography, she becomes more and more cantankerous and isolated. But that phrase, "our clothed insignificance," so well describes what the artist sees, why we can see it too thanks to her, and why we gladly indulge the artist's eccentricity.