Land of Desire by William R Leach

Land of Desire by William R Leach

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.

William Leach is a Columbia University history professor. Land of Desire: Commerce, Power, and the Birth of a New American Culture, a National Book Award finalist, and Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life are two of his previous books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679754114
ISBN 10	0679754113
Title	Land of Desire
Author	William R Leach
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1994-09-06
Number of pages	560
Prizes	Short-listed for National Book Awards 1993
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.