I travelled to Vancouver Island in search of Emily Carr’s iconic landscapes — I’ll never look at B.C. the same way

To begin my trip on theme, I stayed at the Emily Carr Suite (adorned with her paintings) at the Pendray Inn, a historic manor in Victoria’s Inner Harbour, where the locals recommend afternoon tea on the elegant wraparound porch. It’s a quintessentially Victorian experience, and one that Carr might have enjoyed with her sisters and mother — or so I was told when I joined the Emily Carr Chronicles Bus Tour, along with eight of her ardent fans, who knew all about her unusual life.

The quirkier details included her monkey, Woo, a pet she outfitted in dresses and carted around the streets of Victoria in a baby carriage. Woo was immortalized, looking decidedly less than impressed, in a statue of Carr by sculptor Barbara Paterson, erected in front of the Fairmont Empress in 2010. Our tour guide, Marilyn Jones, led us to other stops linked with the artist: Carr House, now a national historic site, where the artist was raised along with her four sisters; Beacon Hill Park, a favourite picnic spot with her mother; and the House of All Sorts, the painter’s former boarding house.

Carr seemed everywhere in Victoria as we followed her story through the colourful streets of her old haunts. By the time we reached her gravestone in Ross Bay Cemetery, now a pilgrimage site for fellow creative souls, I found myself choking up a little at the sight of all the paintbrushes and feathers and pens left by artists paying homage.

I drove along the coast from Victoria on my way to Ucluelet and Tofino, where Carr spent much of her time with the Ucluelet First Nations, making lifelong friends and painting their totem poles. She had an ambition to record all of the standing totem poles throughout the province, and spent years chronicling ones in Haida Gwaii, the Skeena River and elsewhere in B.C.

To guide my stops along my road trip, I took my cues from Carr’s inspirations. My route brought me to Goldstream Park, where she lived for weeks-long periods in an old camper she called “the Elephant,” to paint en plein air, as was her wont. Along Highway 4, I stopped in Cathedral Grove, in MacMillan Park, where the Douglas firs reminded me of Carr’s painting “Forest” (1931-32). Observing the Day-Glo green of the trees in the rain, and the smell of the moss, left me feeling quiet and small and open.

When I arrived in Ucluelet, it seemed like a different world, a rugged little village perched on the Pacific Ocean, dotted with a few cafés and an Indigenous art gallery, Cedar House Gallery, where First Nations carvings and traditional totem poles are on display. I understood what pulled Carr to this remote place — changed though it has since the late 1890s, when she hopped on a steamship to reach it as a young artist, alone and intrepid. There remains a sense of being at the end of the line here.

On my guided hike with Long Beach Nature Tours along the Wild Pacific Trail, I felt somehow deeply alone, in the best sense of the word. It was as though there was nothing beyond my breathing, the birds in the trees, the sound of the wind in the tall grass, and the rhythmic crashing of ocean against rocks.

An animal in the distance made its own path through the forest, until it, too, landed on a long stretch of foggy beach, deserted in the off-season, save for a surfer paddling in the waves. I walked in the cold, salty quiet there, too, combing the beach for bits of driftwood, feeling an unfamiliar ease within myself, wishing I could paint.

Jennifer McGuire travelled as a guest of Destination Victoria and 4VI, which did not review or approve this article.