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| Conservators will be using these tools to prepare
Emily Carr's work for her show's opening day on June 2. |
OTTAWA | March. 31, 2006 — "I'm
only known through my paintings and my novels; for all of that, I must be
dead."
The National Gallery of Canada's Canadian
collection curator Charlie Hill laughs. He is
quoting Emily Carr,
the subject of the National Gallery's summer exhibit this year.
"It's really about seven shows in one," Hill says.
The Carr show will trace her development as an artist as well as exploring
her meaning through the scholars who have studied her work since her death.
It's an expansive look at a single artist, the kind of show that is usually
reserved for artists like Picasso or Monet.
The Carr show caps off a season in which all the major
shows at the National Gallery in Ottawa have been solo exhibits by Canadian
artists. Hill says Carr is a "woman for every season." She was
a painter, writer, feminist and proto-ecologist serving as a medium between
native and non-native people.
In the working wings of the gallery, a team
of experts is getting Emily ready for her close-up.
A big show, quickly
Focusing on Emily Carr gave curators of Canadian art around
the country a chance to fully explore our most studied artist.
"It's been in the works for only two years," Hill
says. "So really it's come together quite quickly for a show of this
size."
The Gallery has devoted its entire temporary exhibit space
to the show; it is almost a third larger than the Norval Morriseau show
currently on display.
Building the exhibit started with a model. Miniatures of
the artwork are arranged in an all-white, painted scale model of the gallery
that looks like a doll house.
Hill discusses the plan as he leans over the model sitting
on a low table in a cramped and windowless room filled with books and
display materials.
Curators arrange and rearrange the work inside the model
until they think they have a fair idea of how the show will look, but
it's always just a rough idea, Hill says. "Things always change once
you get into the gallery."
Damage control
The first room of the show will reproduce a section of a
major Canadian exhibit at the National Gallery in 1927 — which jump-started
Carr's career. The challenge in this room will be that some of the original
hooked rugs and painted masks can only withstand a fraction of the light
the gallery would normally use to illuminate paintings on display.
In the conservator's studio, works that recently arrived
from other museums are laid out on tables to be cleaned and in some cases
restored.
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Crates containing art sit in the storerooms of
the National Gallery of Canada, awaiting their day of fame. |
"Most paintings are cleaned using cotton swabs that
are wound around a wooden stick like a giant Q-tip," says the gallery's
chief conservator Stephen Gritt.
Conservators use their own spit to moisten the cotton. "It's
been done that way forever," he says.
On a table marked with a handwritten sign that says; "do
not touch, active flaking," lies one of Carr's forest works. It's
on loan from another institution and it arrived with an unpleasant surprise
— damage.
Hill says he thinks there is another painting underneath.
He points to a second signature on the underside of the frame, suggesting
something else was there before the scene we see now. An X-ray could prove
it but the piece is not the subject of any dispute so it will likely be
restored, shown and returned to its home gallery with its mysteries intact.
Emily Carr was never rich or even comfortable. Like many
artists, she sometimes used her canvases more than once. She also used
poor quality paper for some of her paintings, giving conservators an extra
challenge.
Her own history
It's ironic that a show of this size and scope should be
mounted for Emily Carr. During her lifetime she was particularly vocal
about her mistrust of art critics and felt that the study and written
criticism of her work was almost always off-base.
"I hate reporters," she once said, "I'm going
to write my own history."
She did. This summer, through her painted history, Emily
lives.
The National Gallery of Canada's Emily Carr exhibit
opens on June 2 and will run until September. 
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