Here There Nowhere: Paintings by Michael Brophy by Michael Brophy, Jonathan Raban, William L. Lang

Abstract

sections of thebook. The review copy had no index.But, overall,Amato succeeds in linking his family storywith broader social and cul tural trendsand uses the"trinity"of secondary sources,genealogical sources,and "storytelling" to "expand thehistorical imagination of those who wish towrite family histories" (p. ix). Throughout the book (and particularly in a final chapter on his own lifeand in theconclu sion) Amato connects his individual storyand psychewith thehistory of his ancestors,mak ingJacob's Well asmuch a personal memoir as familychronicle. Kimberly Jensen Western Oregon University totaldarkness? two small, powerless figures inan 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 PacificNorthwest, in spiteof our best attempts to tame itand exploit it,retains itsability to inspire awe and demand respect. Ruin showswhat can happen when people attempt to subdue the arid lands east of the Cascades. The subject isan abandoned shack in the steppes of Washington or perhaps theOre gon desert.A giantwindow, long since blown out, allows us topeer out into the shrubby land, which clearlyhas not supported crops forsome time.Although evidence of human activity is obvious, thesepaintings show thedominion of nature, not people. The starkgeology of thePacific Northwest plays a prominent role. Five ofBrophy's paint ings,Relic, Here, There,Nowhere, and Dune, all capture, in shades of brown and blue, an untrammeled, uninhabited, and stoic land ? one thatcommands attention. It isabove all a large land.A snow-capped ridge on the edge of a desert, a battlement of columnar basalt, or amassive sand dune against a cloudless sky, shaped bymillions ofyears ofwater,wind, and gravity,leave indelible impressions on travelers or viewers of Brophy's work. The prints arebracketed by twooutstanding essays by JonathanRaban andWilliam Lang. Raban's introduction, "Battleground of the Eye," traces the history of Pacific Northwest painters from John Webber ? who painted for Captain JamesCook ? through Paul Kane to themid twentieth-centuryNorthwest School, the latter of which depicted a decimated environment as dispatched by the timber multinationals. Raban is particularly taken with thework ofGeorge Catlin, who painted throughout the West in thenineteenth century. One of hisworks, A Whale Ashore (completed in 1889), is executed in much the same styleas HERETHERENOWHERE:PAINTINGS BY MICHAEL BROPHY essays by Jonathan Raban and William L. Lang Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2008. Illustrations. 60 pages. $25.00 paper. Here ThereNowhere showcases fifteen recent works by the painter Michael Brophy, who depicts thechanged and charged landscapes of the contemporary PacificNorthwest. Because ofboth his technical skilland ability to contex tualize recentenvironmental and social trends, Brophy has rightlytaken a prominent place in many regional galleries andmuseums. Brophy's moody scenes depict places on both sides of the Cascade Range, some of which seem devastated byhuman action,while others appear to have been moved only by geologic forces over deep time. In some of his paintings, it is thatpoint of contact between nature and humans, between past and present, that Brophy reconstructs. In Blowdown, mas sive,uprooted, old-growth cedars are stacked like cordwood in the foreground, dwarfing the threepeople walking toward them in the fardistance. Likewise, inField, the scene isof twopeople standing ina grassyplain inalmost 632 OHQ vol. 109, no. 4 Brophy: a broad PacificNorthwest beach and an endless sea subsume a band of Indianswho are slaughteringawhale, allwhile a two-masted American vessel and a steamship loom in the background, auguring inevitableeconomic and cultural transformations. William Lang argues in "An Insatiable Hunger: The Consuming Myth of theNorth west" thatBrophy's paintings forceus toboth 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,"hewrites? an unsustainable situation that irrevocably changed the land (p. 46). But Lang also tells us thatwhat Northwesterners do most now is consume,not produce, which isfittingbecause they now must confront the consequences of theirdesires. Brophy, too, sees thisparadoxical situation as itunfolds and presents ittous on a canvas inprovocative and intriguingfashion. Andrew P. Duffin Western Kentucky...