(upbeat music) - Today, I'm not talking about history so much as vision.

All of us who live here are influenced and impacted by the remarkable landscapes and forests of the Pacific Northwest.

For some, it's a spiritual experience.

This place is alive, it speaks, it vibrates.

Artists have long sought to capture that from the indigenous carvers of Salish and North Coast peoples, to the mid-century modernists of the so-called Northwest Mystic school like Mark Toby, Morris Graves, Paul Horiuchi, but there's one artist who captures it like no other.

She's well known in Canada, but less well known in the US.

Her work is unique, original, iconic.

Pause, if you will to appreciate the work of Emily Carr.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Emily Carr was born and raised in Colonial Victoria, British Columbia.

She lived from 1871 to 1945 and spent most of her life there.

Although she studied art in San Francisco, London, and Paris, her work was heavily influenced by the art she encountered.

The poles and figures of first nations people, the fauvists of Europe, French impressionists, and German expressionist.

Carr was eccentric, often, worked in solitude.

She was a female artist in a profession that was male dominated.

For a time, she supported herself running a boarding house.

She walked around Victoria with a pet monkey and assorted other pets in a baby carriage.

She said her hometown folks were surprised that her years in London had not turned her into a proper English lady.

(upbeat music) She had an artistic style that was unique.

Her work has been seen through the critical lenses of feminism, colonialism, Canadian nationalism, romanticism.

She became well known in Canada for her paintings and for her writing, which had a very specific focus, the damp forests of Vancouver Island, and late in life, from her 50s to her 70s, she entered a phase that was especially powerful.

No one has captured the cascading trees, forests, and skies like Emily Carr.

As artist Georgia O'Keeffe is to flowers, Carr is to our trees.

(upbeat music) We now know, as science has shown us, that forests are vast connected communities that communicate, that cooperate, that can listen, smell, and perhaps even think.

They have networks of fibers and fungi, a way of sharing resources like water and sunlight, but before these discoveries, Carr intuited that web of life and captured it on paper and canvas in her own unique way.

She wrote, "I am always asking myself the question, What is it that you are struggling for?

What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess that you want?

Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there?"

(upbeat music) Her red cedars undulate with life like living muscle.

Her skies and light are complex actors, and have vibrancy like a painting by Van Gogh.

"The liveness in me loves to feel the liveness in growing things," she wrote.

She felt the connection of things.

A biographer, Dora Shadbolt, wrote that Carr had managed to "hang onto a vestige of primal spirit affinity with all the forms of creation."

She said Carr had created a Pacific mythos.

(upbeat music) Maybe you or people you know also feel that connection.

When you walk through the rainforest, when you slog through wetland skunk cabbage, when you watch the clouds shifting, cloaking, and parting through the day.

Many of us feel it, but Carr painted it, and not only can she link the viewer with nature's spirit, she wasn't limited to the idea of pristine nature.

She painted landscapes that were scarred by humans, logged, mined, abused.

She was not afraid to look at a clear cut.

She could find the beauty and energy where trees and sky met gravel pits and stumps.

She could connect where others might only feel sadness.

"Mother Earth," she mused, "Will hide it away in her ample brown folds, and purify and absorb its good, bringing it back to usefulness."

Carr takes you into the forest's dark places too.

(upbeat music) Like moving through multiple drapes into an interior space, at once a live, mysterious, inviting, oppressive.

My father worked on a logging camp survey crew deep in the old growth of the Olympic Peninsula in the 1930s, at the time, Carr was painting her forest pictures.

He described places that were silent, where sound was muffled.

"When the forest went quiet," he said, "You might spot an indigenous tree burial in the canopy above."

If much of her work captures, as one critic put it, "the trembling luminosity of the sky," she also painted the intensity of the coastal forest that can seem like a living womb or tomb.

Great art is unique, but speaks to a larger truth.

Often, feelings that are hard to put into words or images.

Before science uncovered secrets of living forests, Emily Carr's paintings captured their essence and their knowing.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Hear more about this episode on the Mossback podcast.

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- [Announcer] "Mossback's Northwest" is made possible by the generous support of Port of Seattle.