“A painter of anti-heroic subject matter on a heroic scale, wittily and effectively chronicling the fate of our environment.”
—Art in America

Rehearsals began today for PCS’s production of Ken Kesey’s iconic Oregon novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, adapted and directed by Aaron Posner. Fitting then that, in conjunction with this world premiere staging, we have the opportunity to showcase the equally iconic paintings of Northwest artist Michael Brophy.

Heroic in scale but unsentimental in deployment, Brophy’s work is an ideal visual partner to Kesey’s narrative. Like Kesey’s bold, epic novel, considered by many to be one of the greatest pieces of Oregon literature, Brophy’s work continues an Oregon tradition that looks at landscape, place, and regional character—while posing tough questions about our role as stewards, pioneers, and antagonists of the Northwest horizon.

Summing up the epic quality of that tension, Brophy recounts a drive through Kesey country to the Oregon Coast where he came upon an enormous clear cut: “It looked like World War I. . .It was kind of awesome and sublime. Of course it was destructive, but it was spectacular too.”

An award-winning visual artist, Brophy has exhibited extensively throughout the region. In 2005, he was honored with a retrospective at the Tacoma Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. His work is in a number of collections including Microsoft, the Multnomah County Library Collection, the Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma Art Museums, OSU Library in Corvallis, and the City of Portland and was given a the fifteen-minutes-of pop-fame spotlight as the cover imagery on Sleater-Kinney’s 2005 album “The Woods.”

As Jon Raymond’s noted, the work is, “Melancholic and darkly funny, [forming] a deadpan commentary on the often-indistinct border between nature and civilization.” But rather than a didactic Northwestern Wobbly-spring radicalism, Brophy’s work has a lyric luminescence that suggests Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra: “Wrathful but Calm. Austere but Comic” . . .a sly Buster Keaton-meets-Wendell Berry reminder that:
“The land bears the scars
of minds whose history
was imprinted by no example
of forebearing mind.”

Charles D’Ambrosio astutely captured the protector-pillager dynamic in Brophy’s version of frontier and forest: “Ruin is painted 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. His work holds us in place, keeps us motionless, transfixed by an arrangement of harmonies that don’t add up, that offer an artistic calm but no ethical or social way out.”

Never give a inch, indeed!

During March and April, a number of the artist’s paintings (including the 6-x-7-foot painting “Pacific Wonderland,” seen on the poster for the show) will be on view, courtesy of Laura Russo Gallery, on the Mezzanine, lower PGE Gallery and Studio lobby levels of the Gerding Theater at the Armory.

Preview Brophy’s work this First Thursday, Mar. 6, 5:30-7:30 pm. Also featuring live music by Per Se
Read more from Tim duRoche’s blog.

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