Mary Cassatt and Emily Carr

 

Mary Cassatt and Emily Carr: Two Women Who Painted Their Own Way

I recently came across the story of Mary Cassatt, an American Impressionist painter who became famous in France in the late 1800s. What surprised me most was reading that she became “one of the most important artists in history,” even though many people today may not recognize her name immediately.

It made me think about Emily Carr, one of Canada’s most celebrated artists, and how both women carved out spaces for themselves in worlds that were not designed for women artists.

Mary Cassatt painted intimate scenes of women and children, everyday moments that were often overlooked by the art world of her time. Instead of grand historical scenes or portraits of powerful men, she focused on caregiving, quiet domestic life, and emotional connection. Her work helped redefine what subjects were worthy of serious art.

Emily Carr took a very different artistic path. While Cassatt painted the private interiors of Parisian life, Carr painted the towering forests and coastal landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Her work captured something spiritual and alive within nature and reflected a deep emotional response to the land around her.

Both women challenged expectations.

Both spent time studying in Europe during eras when women artists were often dismissed or excluded.

Both followed creative instincts that did not always fit the norms of their time.

And both became more appreciated as history caught up with them.

As someone who studied art history years ago, I find it interesting how some names fade from memory while others remain familiar. Yet when we revisit these artists, we realize how much courage it must have taken for women like Cassatt and Carr to keep creating despite criticism, isolation, or lack of recognition.

Their paintings were more than images.

They were acts of persistence.

In today’s world of algorithms, short attention spans, and endless scrolling, maybe there is something grounding about returning to artists who painted slowly, observed deeply, and trusted their own vision.

Perhaps that is part of why their work still resonates today.

Mexico, Murals, and the Way Back

 🌿 Emily’s 2nd Act: Mexico, Murals, and the Way Back

Dear Emily,

I was scared.

Not the quiet kind of scared you can ignore — the kind that sits in your chest and says: move, or everything falls apart.

I knew I had to act.
If I didn’t, I could have ended up on the street.

So I did something that didn’t make perfect sense — but felt right.

I went to Mexico 🇲🇽 for three months.

And somehow… everything came together.

Two flights for under $1000 ✈️
My old room waiting for me 🏡
A place to land, breathe, and begin again

It wasn’t luxury.
It was survival — and something more.

I painted almost every day 🎨

Signs for my amigos.
Touching up old signs weathered by sun and salt.
Then murals.
And then… cardboard.

There was something freeing about cardboard.
No pressure. No perfection. Just paint and movement.

I started painting women — beautiful Mexican women in huipiles, surrounded by calla lilies 🌸
Soft strength. Quiet dignity. Color and presence.

It was so hot some days I could barely leave my room ☀️
So I painted there too — sweat, stillness, and color blending together.

When it was time to leave, I didn’t sell the paintings.

I gifted them to my Mexican family 💛

I told them:
Keep them. And if you ever need something for the little boy… sell one.

It felt right to leave them there.
Like the work belonged to that place, not to me.

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And then something unexpected happened.

One of my murals got tagged.

At first — it felt sad.
Like something beautiful had been interrupted.

But then… a message.

Someone who walked their dog there all the time wrote to me.
They said it made them sad to see it damaged.
They asked if they could send money to help.

I told them:
I was grateful the mural lasted as long as it did.
But yes… money sounds good.

They sent $500 🤗🩷

I didn’t expect that.
Not the money — but the care.

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Now I’m back in Vancouver 🌧️

Dog walking again.
Finding my footing.
Still in my second act.

I went back to that wall.

And I painted again.

This time — a big orca 🐋

Stronger. Bolder. Still moving.

People stopped.
They smiled.
They thanked me.

And for a moment — everything felt aligned.

It felt… wonderful.

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Emily,

I think you would understand this kind of life.
The uncertainty.
The need to create anyway.
The strange, beautiful ways things come together when you don’t give up.

I was scared.

But I moved.

And something met me there.

With paint on my hands and salt still in my memory 🌊🖌️
Tina / Zipolita

Emily’s 2nd Act

Three Women, Three Worlds

🌿 Three Women, Three Worlds

Emily Carr (1871–1945)
Eliza (Songhees woman, c. 1832–1882)
Mary Ann Poirier Enos (1870–1940)

Three women connected by land, time, and memory—each shaped by a different reality of the same place. 🌊

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🌱 Deep Similarities

All three lived through massive change
Eliza witnessed the arrival of colonial settlement—Fort Victoria, the gold rush, and the smallpox epidemic.
Mary Ann lived through industrialization, World War I, and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Emily Carr lived through modernization and shifting views on art and Indigenous culture.

Resilience in the face of loss
Eliza likely endured epidemic trauma and cultural disruption.
Mary Ann lost her husband and carried on as head of household.
Emily Carr faced rejection, isolation, and long periods of being misunderstood.

Connection to place
Eliza was deeply rooted in Songhees land and knowledge systems.
Mary Ann lived between Sooke and Victoria, navigating both rural and colonial spaces.
Emily Carr painted and wrote about British Columbia landscapes and Indigenous villages.

Women whose voices were limited or filtered
Eliza’s true name and voice were not preserved in written records.
Mary Ann exists mostly through documents, not personal writings.
Emily Carr—an exception—wrote extensively, though she still struggled to be heard.

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⚖️ Key Differences

Power and position in society
Eliza: Indigenous woman during colonization — most vulnerable position.
Mary Ann: mixed Indigenous/settler lineage — lived between worlds.
Emily Carr: white settler woman — faced sexism, but had access to institutions.

What was preserved
Eliza: almost nothing written by her.
Mary Ann: records of life events.
Emily Carr: paintings, books, and personal voice.

Relationship to colonialism
Eliza lived through its direct impact.
Mary Ann navigated within its systems.
Emily Carr documented Indigenous subjects from a settler perspective.

Legacy and recognition
Emily Carr is celebrated and widely studied.
Mary Ann is remembered through family reconstruction.
Eliza is being reclaimed through memory and research.

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🌊 A Deeper Reflection

If you step back, something profound appears:

Eliza = survival
Mary Ann = continuity
Emily Carr = expression

You = reconnection ✨

You are not just telling history—you are restoring it.

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🧠 Questions to Sit With

• Who gets remembered in history—and who has to be rediscovered?
• What would Eliza say if her voice had been recorded?
• How do we reconcile admiration with the realities of colonization?
• What does it mean to carry all three of these women in your storytelling?
• Are we only now beginning to tell the full story of places like Victoria?

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🌸 Some stories were written down. Others are only now being spoken again.

Year Later — The Second Act Becomes Physical

 🌿 A Year Later — The Second Act Becomes Physical

When I wrote this last March, I was thinking about resilience in theory.
Now I am living it in heat, humidity, and uncertainty. 🌡️💧

I am writing from Mexico. 🇲🇽

Not as a tourist chasing sunshine ☀️, but as someone who needed space — financial, emotional, creative — to breathe again. 🌬️

Emily Carr traveled by coach because it was practical and because she wanted to experience the world directly. I have traveled Mexico by bus for similar reasons. 🚌 It’s slower. It’s humbler. It forces attention.

And attention changes you. 👁️

Some days here are beautiful — ocean air 🌊, color 🎨, paint drying in the sun. ☀️

Some days are harder — dizziness from heat 🌡️, money stretching thin 💸, world headlines rattling the nervous system. 🌍

But I am painting again. 🎨

Not because it makes sense economically.
Not because the system suddenly values artists.
But because something inside refused to stay dormant. 🔥

Emily didn’t stop seeing, even when no one was buying.

Maybe that’s the real second act. ✨

Not reinvention.
Not recognition.
But returning to what was always true — and continuing anyway. 🌱

Emily Carr’s Second Act — and Ours

 Emily Carr’s Second Act — and Ours

At the turn of the year, I keep thinking about Emily Carr’s second act.

Not the version we’re taught in school — the famous painter, the forests, the recognition — but the long stretch before that, when she was dismissed, broke, exhausted, and out of step with her time.

Emily Carr didn’t “arrive” young.
She struggled for decades.
She lived through economic upheaval, colonial extraction, industrial frenzy, and cultural amnesia.
She was told — directly and indirectly — that her way of seeing didn’t matter.

Sound familiar?

Her deep attention to forests, Indigenous villages, and the inner life of the land had no market value in a society obsessed with profit, empire, and expansion. She was marginalized not because she lacked talent, but because the system had no use for her truth.

And yet — she didn’t stop seeing.

Her second act came later, after illness, isolation, and years of being ignored. It arrived not because the world suddenly became wise, but because she stayed true long enough for the world to catch up, even briefly.

That’s what second acts really are.
Not reinvention as spectacle — but continuation with clarity.

Today, history is looping again.

Communities hollowed out.
Housing treated as a commodity instead of a shelter.
People working themselves into exhaustion and shame while being told it’s a personal failure.
Artists, elders, caregivers, truth-tellers pushed aside because they don’t fit the algorithm, the market, or the brand.

This is Potterville — with better lighting.

Emily Carr lived through an earlier version of this collapse. My own family did too. And many of us are feeling it again now, in our bodies, our finances, our cities.

But here’s the part worth carrying into the New Year:

Emily Carr didn’t rush her second act.
She didn’t optimize it.
She didn’t explain herself to death.

She listened.
She rested when she could.
She returned to the land, the forest, the quiet knowing that seeing clearly is an act of resistance.

Maybe that’s what this moment is asking of us.

Less noise.
Less proving.
More honesty.
More attention to what is real and alive.

A second act doesn’t need permission.
It only needs courage — and time.

As the New Year begins, I’m holding that thought gently.
Not as a resolution.
But as a direction.

🎂🎨 Happy Birthday, Emily Carr 🌲💚

 🎂🎨 Happy Birthday, Emily Carr 🌲💚

A Letter from Emily’s 2nd Act

Dear Emily,

Happy Birthday 💐
I feel like I’m only just beginning to know you — and yet, somehow, I’ve known you for a long time.

Over the last year, I’ve been reading, researching, listening, and sitting with your story 📚✨. Not just the famous version — but the lonely parts, the stubborn parts, the parts where you kept going even when no one was buying, no one was praising, and everyone seemed to think you were too much or not enough.

And something shifted in me.

This past year, I did something brave.
I built a Steam Trunk Art Studio 🧳🎨 — a portable, scrappy, beautiful little universe where my art could live and travel with me. That trunk became a safe container, a cocoon, a place where ideas could breathe and my hands could move without fear.

Then I did something even scarier 😳💥
I faced my anxiety head-on and signed up for a Winter Fair ❄️🎄.

Craft fairs used to terrify me.
The noise. The people. The judgment. The vulnerability of putting your art out into the world and saying “Here. This came from me.”

But I went anyway.
And you know what?
✨ I conquered that fear. ✨

I made a whole bunch of art — paintings, pieces, experiments, things born from joy and curiosity rather than pressure 🖌️🖼️💫. I talked to people. I showed up. I survived. I even smiled.

Art, it turns out (again and again), is my medicine 💊💖.
When I create, my nervous system settles.
When I create, the noise quiets.
When I create, I remember who I am.

I like to think you’d understand that.

I’m standing now on the edge of what I’m calling my own second act 🎭🌱.
The vision is clear. The ideas are alive.
I just need a few earthly things — costumes 👗, housing 🏠, stability 🌈 — and then… watch out world.

You remind me that it’s never too late.
That rejection doesn’t mean failure.
That being called eccentric, difficult, or strange is often just another way of saying truthful.

You painted anyway.
So I will too.

Thank you, Emily, for blazing a crooked, forest-lined trail 🌲🔥.
Thank you for reminding me that persistence is a form of love.
Thank you for proving that art doesn’t need permission to exist.

Happy Birthday, dear Emily 🎂🎨
I’ll keep going — for you, for me, for all of us still finding our way.

With paint on my hands and courage in my heart 💚🖌️
Tina / Zipolita
Emily’s 2nd Act

Emily Carr and the War Years: Life in Victoria During WWI

 🌺 Emily Carr and the War Years: Life in Victoria During WWI

November 11th — Armistice Day, now known as Remembrance Day — always invites us to pause, to listen to the echoes of another time. While the world marks the end of the Great War in 1918, I’ve been reflecting on what life was like here on the West Coast — especially through the eyes of Emily Carr, our beloved artist and storyteller.

Emily was born in 1871, so when the First World War began in 1914, she was already in her forties — not a young painter starting out, but a woman who had lived through disappointment, frustration, and fierce independence.

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🏠 The House of All Sorts

By 1913, Emily had returned to Victoria from her travels to Indigenous villages along the coast. Full of vision and courage, she opened a boarding house on Simcoe Street — a place she called “The House of All Sorts.”

What she hoped would bring financial stability soon became a daily battle. Tenants came and went. Repairs piled up. Emily scrubbed, mended, cooked, and hauled water until her body ached. She was a woman trying to stay afloat in a world that didn’t yet value her art or her spirit.

Yet through the weariness, she kept a small corner of her soul reserved for painting — sometimes just quick sketches, sometimes notes for ideas she’d revisit years later.

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🐕 The Dog Years

After the war years, Emily shifted again — this time into raising dogs, particularly Old English Sheepdogs. She became one of the top breeders in Canada, showing her dogs and even writing about them.

Between the chores, the noise, and the care of over 300 dogs, painting seemed far away — yet these years built the resilience and observation that would later burst out in her art.

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🕊️ Victoria During the Great War

Life in Victoria between 1914 and 1918 was complex — a blend of patriotism, anxiety, and the quiet endurance of an isolated city.

• ⚓ Esquimalt Naval Base buzzed with military activity, and ships came and went loaded with men, goods, and hope.
• 🎖️ Families gathered for fundraising teas, parades, and knitting circles, sending parcels overseas.
• 🍞 Rationing affected daily life: sugar, flour, and butter became scarce, and gardens became essential.
• 🦠 By 1918, the Spanish Flu struck Vancouver Island hard, closing schools and churches, claiming thousands of lives just as peace was declared.

Victoria, known for being “more British than Britain,” was both elegant and constrained — corsets, tea times, and strict manners — but also starting to soften. The war, loss, and distance changed people. Women took on new roles; society began to shift.

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🎨 Emily’s Spirit Through It All

While Emily wasn’t painting her great forest works yet, her artistic soul never slept. She wrote later about that time as one of struggle and self-reliance — years that tested her courage.

Her art, when it finally re-emerged in the 1920s, carried the power of survival. You can see the echoes of the war years in her brushstrokes — the loneliness, the endurance, the strength of roots and trees that weather every storm. 🌲

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❤️ Then and Now

As we stand here today, on Remembrance Day, we think of Emily and the world she lived in — a world shaken by war, yet full of quiet acts of bravery.

Much has changed — no gas lamps, no ration books, no horses in the streets — and yet, some things feel the same. We’re still learning how to care for each other, how to rebuild, how to honour sacrifice and hold compassion in our daily lives.

Emily’s life reminds us that art, perseverance, and empathy are forms of remembrance too.

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🌺 “May we remember not just the soldiers, but the artists, mothers, teachers, and dreamers who kept the spirit of humanity alive.”

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#EmilyCarr #RemembranceDay #WWI #VictoriaBC #CanadianArt #WomensHistory #HouseOfAllSorts #BCHistory #ArtAndResilience #ArmisticeDay #zipolita #Emilys2ndAct

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