Here There Nowhere: Paintings by Michael Brophy - Softcover

Jonathan Raban (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870712950 ISBN 13: 9780870712951

Publisher: Oregon State University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Michael Brophy has painted the Pacific Northwest landscape for over two decades, from sumptuously rendered panoramas of clearcuts and slag heaps to comic-book-scaled noir tableaus of the characters who reshaped the region 150 years ago. This large-scale monograph brings 15 of his most historically expansive paintings to date together with writings on the artistic and cultural history of the Northwest landscape by essayist Jonathan Raban and historian William L. Lang. The influences on Brophy's painting stretch from Goya and Velasquez to Robert Colescott and Georg Baselitz. He has riffed on everything from obscure Wobbly songs to Chinook jargon dictionaries to the writings of Stewart Holbrook. But Here There Nowhere marks a bold new direction in Brophy's work. More sweeping in scope and minimalist in style, the paintings portray what he calls the Big Empty, the dramatic, vacant spaces of the Northwest's eastern deserts and western coast but with an eye toward the coming endgame of Manifest Destiny. Raban's essay, Battleground of the Eye, traces two centuries of artistic conflict between the verdant, people-free Northwest most painters chose to portray vs. the fully populated and exploited landscape that actually existed. Lang's essay, An Insatiable Hunger: The Consuming Myth of the Northwest, probes the changing mythology of Pacific Northwest landscape as it has progressed from an apparently infinite resource for extractive industries to a playground for an expanding consumer class. Designer John Laursen has translated the sweeping power of Brophy's work to the scale of a 12-by-12-inch book with the 200-line reproductions imaged direct to plate and printed by Portland's award-winningMillcross Litho.

About this title

Review

"A painter of anti-heroic subject matter on a heroic scale, wittily and effectively chronicling the fate of our environment."

"Brophy paints ruin as if it were eternal, as if there were nothing to recover, as if beauty persists, generous and spacious, even when the landscape of our longing does not." -- Charles D'Ambrosio

Edition details

• Publisher: Oregon State University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870712950
• ISBN 13: 9780870712951
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277