New West Book Review

“Here There Nowhere”: Michael Brophy’s Haunting Landscapes

By Jenny Shank, 6-16-08

Here There Nowhere: Paintings by Michael Brophy
Oregon State University Press
49 pages, $25

The first painting I saw by Oregon’s Michael Brophy was “Night Truck.” Although its subject matter might be considered ugly, it’s a beautiful painting, with a silver semi front and center, charging through a dark night, illuminated by the headlights of the vehicle behind it like a stage performer awash in footlights.  It’s an evocative image that cast me, and surely many who look at it, back into memories of long night drives across the West.  There’s something about it that reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting: maybe the name, which recalls “Nighthawks,” Brophy’s skillful use of empty space and artificial light, or perhaps its feeling of brooding isolation that invites viewers to question exactly how they came to spend a sleepless night following this steel behemoth, the natural world surrounding the road erased in darkness so that they might be anywhere.

A reproduction of “Night Truck” appears in Here There Nowhere, a selection of recent Brophy oil paintings that Oregon State Press has published along with essays by Jonathan Raban and William L. Lang.  Brophy has a reputation for depicting the natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest after humans have altered it, though as Raban notes, he usually doesn’t including the humans in the painting. 

When Brophy does include people, he doesn’t emphasize them.  There is a trio of tiny people present in the distance of the painting “Blowdown,” dwarfed by massive trees stacked on their sides, the violence of the effort it took to rip them out of the earth suggested by the grasping remains of their roots.  Who did this?  Was it those people, who linger like three tiny ants of the apocalypse in the background?  Maybe not—it may have been wind or a volcano blast, but those people will surely become involved in one way or another, to claim the freshly downed timber.

Raban’s essay places Brophy’s paintings into the larger context of Western and Pacific Northwestern landscape painting, from Albert Bierstadt to George Caitlin, and William L. Lang writes about the commentary Brophy’s painting provides on the environmental degradation in Oregon—he’s known for depicting clear cuts and felled trees, as he does in “Aftermath,” which presents a pile of tree shrapnel under a portentous steel blue sky.

But Brophy’s oil paintings can just as easily be appreciated simply for their use of color and light.  “There,” a landscape with a watery blue sky, a strip of mountains, a flat line of blue river, and a patch of brown earth offers a pleasant visual harmony.  Many of the pictures in this collection depict darkness, such as the lush green field in “Meadow,” stretching under a starless black sky.  “Full Dark” is arresting, too, a painting about night, with few signs of life except for the ghostly, grayish hints of foliage in the foreground.  Again there are no stars to be seen, perhaps because of light pollution that plunges the natural world near big cities into profound darkness after the sun goes down. 

In “Pallet Fire” an orange flame leaps up out of darkness, and seems even more haunting after I learned that a night fire destroyed Brophy’s house and studio last year as he was working on these paintings, including “Pallet Fire,” which he managed to save and restore.

The second half of the book moves into daylight, with “Relic,” a depiction of a book cliff formation with tumbled-down chunks of rock littering the hillside suggesting the remains of some abandoned civilization.  In “Day,” Brophy presents the sequel to “Night Truck”: this time we’re on the highway in the middle of the day, and can see the scrub brush on the side of the road and the mountains in the far distance.  And we’re following not the imposing truck of the first painting, but a semi traveling without its trailer, which always looks so strange and off-balance, like a centipede running around without its body.  What is it supposed to mean?  Brophy has left that up to the viewer, once again creating an aesthetically pleasing painting that toys with romantic notions of the West and leaves one with a certain disquiet about the changing nature of this region’s landscape and our place in it.

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