Doris Shadbolt, author of The Art of Emily Carr (1979) and editor of The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (1993), was awarded the Order of Canada in 1976. Her most recent book, published by Douglas & McIntyre, is Seven Journeys, although her paperback copy of Bill Reid is scheduled to appear in May 2003. She was interviewed in the studio of her late husband, Jack Shadbolt. Surrounded by his evocative paintings, her papers, and an array of books, we had a lively discussion that ranged from her new book, Seven Journeys, to the research materials that she has left with Special Collections at the University of British Columbia, to the general state of criticism that has proliferated around Carr and her paintings and writing. The interview that follows is only an excerpt.

Linda Morra: Where are you leaving the papers related to your research on Carr?

Doris Shadbolt: The University of British Columbia Archives, although I still have the material relating to Seven Journeys. I have photocopies of all the drawings from Carr's notebooks, not just those that are included in the new book, because one would always like to reproduce far more than the publication will allow. All the visual material is available there; however, less than half of the total appears in Seven Journeys.

LM: How did you choose which sketches to omit?
DS: You can imagine the difficulty of this task. At a point, the decision almost becomes arbitrary. Let's say, for instance, that there is this group that deals with her forest studiesùI could have looked at it that way. But from time to time there are those that have the richest possibilities for whatever reason as material for her later studio work at a time when she was desperately struggling to find a form for saying what she felt about the forest. Is this drawing of relevance to other, later work? Or is the drawing itself of such elegance and sharpness of perception that you can't exclude it? Some are just so gorgeous. In some of the sketches, she rendered the whole thing in a few imaginative lines.

LM: Those were the two deciding factors: the elegance of the sketch itself or how û

DS: How it was relevant to her larger work.

LM: How did you decide to work on Carr?

DS: The first position I held in the art field after I graduated from U of T was at what was then called the Art Gallery of Toronto, but what is now called the Art Gallery of Ontario. This would have been in 1942. By this time, the bequest of the Emily Carr Trust, a selection of paintings made by Carr and Lawren Harris some years previously, had already gone to the Vancouver Art Gallery. An arrangement was made to have the paintings shipped to the Art Gallery of Toronto for safekeeping. The director, Martin Baldwin, made the wise decision to exhibit them, since they were being held at the Gallery. I was given the job of making a preliminary catalogue of what was there. Today, you would automatically photograph everything; in those days, you wouldn't. So when I began listing them, I thought, how on earth are we ever going to know what painting is which because the titles are so similarù"Deep Forest", "Edge of the Forest", "Into the Forest", "Out of the Forest" or whatever û

LM: (laughter) That's true û

DS: How can we ever tell which painting I'm talking about? So I decided to make thumbnail sketches about the size of a stamp of every painting. It's difficult imprinting on your mind what Emily would have called the "idea." You know how in her writing she talks about sitting down, collecting her thoughts, and getting clear in her head the "idea" of the painting? If you're doing what I was doing, you've got to get the idea of that painting. That means you really have to look at it and condense it into a small form. That's how I got into Carr.

LM: She is an engaging figure.

DS: Isn't she!

LM: Why does she attract committed scholars?

DS: She is so strong. It's the strength of her painting and the dimension of it, of which you never quite seem to reach the bottom. In what I call her mature work, she managed to embrace all the dimensions of her being to add to her paintings. Although she did wonderful work in her early years, up to her fifty-sixth year, she hadn't yet become "Emily Carr". All the components of her own natureùshe hadn't learned yet how to put them into her painting. I think that's why her mature work is so strong and so grasping. It's because she applied her whole character to her painting and, of course, she was completely fascinating as a strong, tough individual. She's important to us for that reason as well.
LM: Back to Seven Journeys. Why did you decide to set it up the way you did ùas "seven journeys"?

DS: The notebooks themselves call for it: each one relates to a trip she made in the years between 1927 and 1930. I can't tell you how many hours I spent in the Archives in Victoria going through these drawings. I wanted to be able to determine what drawings belonged to which books. In the Victoria Archives, whoever had taken them apart for the purposes of conservation had used inconsistent numbering. So, I would lie awake at night trying to make sense of it û

LM: It's a researcher's nightmare û

DS: It really was. I used to think I wouldn't figure out this numerical puzzle. At any rate, I was astonished by how beautiful the sketches were. For the most part, I could figure out from which book a group of drawings had been derived and where they were done because, happily, the covers had been conserved and on the front she would say, "Skeena, so and so," or "Ottawa Museum." But, apart from this, what animates the books so marvellously is her little homey, personal notes reminding herself "Go to the post office" and so forth. There's a kind of spontaneity there that takes you right into her life which makes it very alive.

LM: That's extraordinary. . . . Presumably, this is the last book you'll be putting out on Carr?

DS: Yes. I am now going to leave that poor woman alone.

LM: (Laughter) I wondered. Giving your papers over was your final gesture?

DS: Absolutely.

LM: That's so disappointing û

DS: Very kind of you to say so. But it's not the last work that will be done on Carr, I assure you.