She had no serious role models to follow while growing up, but
as a child Emily Carr had experienced the pleasures of drawing
and sketching. When she was orphaned in her early teens she
persuaded her guardians to permit her at the age of 18 to go to
San Francisco to study art at the California School of Design,
an art school where instruction followed conservative models of
the time. There she learned the basic elements of the craft of
painting as it was then taught. She returned home after 2½
years, began painting competent little watercolours, and set up
painting classes for children. A study trip to England in 1899
did little to advance her art and was extended by a lengthy
illness into 1904, when she returned to Victoria. There she
became aware, even in the isolation of her hometown, that the
larger world of art encompassed more than the conventional art
with which she was familiar and which she herself practised. In
1910, determined to find out what the new art was all about, she
gathered up her savings