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REVIEWS
HERE THERE NOWHERE: PAINTINGS BY MICHAEL BROPHY
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essays by Jonathan Raban and William L. Lang
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| Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2008. Illustrations. 60 pages. $25.00 paper. |
| Here There Nowhere showcases fifteen recent works by the painter Michael Brophy, who depicts the changed and charged landscapes of the contemporary Pacific Northwest. Because of both his technical skill and ability to contextualize recent environmental and social trends, Brophy has rightly taken a prominent place in many regional galleries and museums. |
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Brophy's moody scenes depict places on both sides of the Cascade Range, some of which seem devastated by human action, while others appear to have been moved only by geologic forces over deep time. In some of his paintings, it is that point of contact between nature and humans, between past and present, that Brophy reconstructs. In Blowdown, massive, uprooted, old-growth cedars are stacked like cordwood in the foreground, dwarfing the three people walking toward them in the far distance. Likewise, in Field, the scene is of two people standing in a grassy plain in almost total darkness — two small, powerless figures in an ominous night. Even in Day, which shows the backside of a big-rig truck on a two-lane highway barreling through the eastern desert in an afternoon sun, the impressive size and strength of the truck is but a lonely figure against a distant horizon. The land of the Pacific Northwest, in spite of our best attempts to tame it and exploit it, retains its ability to inspire awe and demand respect. |
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Ruin shows what can happen when people attempt to subdue the arid lands east of the Cascades. The subject is an abandoned shack in the steppes of Washington or perhaps the Oregon desert. A giant window, long since blown out, allows us to peer out into the shrubby land, which clearly has not supported crops for some time. Although evidence of human activity is obvious, these paintings show the dominion of nature, not people. |
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The stark geology of the Pacific Northwest plays a prominent role. Five of Brophy's paintings, Relic, Here, There, Nowhere, and Dune, all capture, in shades of brown and blue, an untrammeled, uninhabited, and stoic land — one that commands attention. It is above all a large land. A snow-capped ridge on the edge of a desert, a battlement of columnar basalt, or a massive sand dune against a cloudless sky, shaped by millions of years of water, wind, and gravity, leave indelible impressions on travelers or viewers of Brophy's work. |
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The prints are bracketed by two outstanding essays by Jonathan Raban and William Lang. Raban's introduction, "Battleground of the Eye," traces the history of Pacific Northwest painters from John Webber — who painted for Captain James Cook — through Paul Kane to the mid twentieth-century Northwest School, the latter of which depicted a decimated environment as dispatched by the timber multinationals. Raban is particularly taken with the work of George Catlin, who painted throughout the West in the nineteenth century. One of his works, A Whale Ashore (completed in 1889), is executed in much the same style as Brophy: a broad Pacific Northwest beach and an endless sea subsume a band of Indians who are slaughtering a whale, all while a two-masted American vessel and a steamship loom in the background, auguring inevitable economic and cultural transformations. |
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William Lang argues in "An Insatiable Hunger: The Consuming Myth of the Northwest" that Brophy's paintings force us to both stand in awe of the abundance of the region and to de-mythologize it and acknowledge the impact of human capriciousness. "Wealth came from the guts of the earth," he writes — an unsustainable situation that irrevocably changed the land (p. 46). But Lang also tells us that what Northwesterners do most now is consume, not produce, which is fitting because they now must confront the consequences of their desires. Brophy, too, sees this paradoxical situation as it unfolds and presents it to us on a canvas in provocative and intriguing fashion. |
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| Andrew P. Duffin
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| Western Kentucky University |
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