Portland really is a transportation city. It seems that we can never have enough different modes of transportation, much less use them as officially intended. We have light rail that behaves like a metro, commuter trains trying to behave like light rail, and last but not least a streetcar that sometimes behaves like a streetcar, but other times tries to be something more like light rail as well. Then there’s the busses, cars, boats and ships, and oddities like the aerial tram.

The end result is that by-and-large there’s always something moving in town, always some vehicle loaded with people going to and fro different places. It’s also a cacophony of sharp edges and curves, smooth shiny reflections and grime, stillness and motion. It makes Portland — and especially downtown — a target rich environment.

Well that took a bit longer than expected.

Liquidated is the second in my 99W Series of paintings. This is a planned sequence of images using the thread of old Pacific Highway West through Western Oregon as a common theme. The road forms a cross section of the western portion of the state, stretching from urban Portland through to the rural prairies of the Willamette Valley. This latest painting follows the earlier Morning Rush, Portland….

…Earlier by two years.

It is really amusing because Morning Rush, Portland I completed in January 2007, and immediately afterwards began Liquidated. My academic activities, however, quickly took over my time and attention. For the longest time, the painting sat clipped to an oversized Masonite clipboard, 2/3rds done. Every time I looked at it, I felt guilt, as if it were an abandoned child. There was never enough time. There was never enough motivation. Always my calendar had something else to do, some other thing that needed my attention. If the painting had been a garden it would have been growing dandelions.

Now that the 2008-2009 academic year has wound down, I’ve been playing catch up. There’s been lots of cleaning, straightening, book sorting — scarily enough there are over forty books I have collected over the year that have yet to be read — and all manner of other reprioritization that is now possible with the additional time on my hands. One of the activities that immediately rose to the top of the to-do list: complete Liquidated.

Monday saw me heading downtown on WES to supplement my disintegrating brush collection. Tuesday morning saw me cleaning out the paintbox, the old dried up palettes, the caked and dead tubes of paint. Tuesday night saw me marathoning until 1:30 in the morning, the smell of wet cotton paper in the air and my fingers stained with viridian green and Prussian blue.

Creating — be it writing, photography, or watercolors — is a vital part of me, but somewhere along the way of the last four years, I lost that. I came, somehow, to the conclusion that I had to set that part of me aside to get more important things done. The reality is, however, that that act of creating was what was important all along. The ground is familiar now, and it feels good.

Approaching Nowhere
Photography by Jeff Brouws with essays by William L. Fox and Jeff Brouws. W.W. Norton, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110; http://www.wwnorton.com/; 12.3 x 11.6 x 0.8 in; hardbound; 160 pages, 112 color photos, 1 illustration; $50.00

It is one of the fundamental facts of the 20th century that Americans came to live in their cars. Thanks to cheap gas, a government subsidized highway system, and what seemed like growth without natural limits, the roadside became the face of “modern” America. Much of this has become part of the country’s romantic self-image. Big finned steel behemoths cruising small downtowns; throaty muscle cars roaring down stretches of two-lane tarmac in the boonies; drive through everything, from restaurants to coffee stands to banks to liquor stores. As the century ended, however, some of the gloss came off. Car culture always looked ahead, and thus never cared what it left behind it: neglected city centers, unwalkable suburbs, abandoned mom-and-pop retailers, and a cheap attitude of disposable mediocrity. In Approaching Nowhere (published by W. W. Norton in 2006), photographer Jeff Brouws turns his camera on this detritus, and shows us a lonely, haunting, melancholy world.

The book is first and foremost a photographer’s monograph. All the images are Brouws’, and tellingly at he end of the volume is a curriculum vitae — one wonders if this isn’t jumping the gun considering that Brouws is still very much alive and producing. The photos take up the over-whelming majority of the book, and are divided into three sections. The first, titled “The Highway Landscape”, primarily consists of images of roadside America. This section contains the bulk of the photographs in the book. The second is titled “The Franchised Landscape”, and concentrates on the corporatized strip-mall and drive through landscape. Lastly is “The Discarded Landscape”, concentrating primarily on urban decay. Following the photo sections are two essays, the first by noted writer William L. Fox, and the second by Brouws himself. Both Fox and Brouws write about the American landscape and how the development of “freeway culture” has effected it. Brouws includes a page of footnotes for his essay, and then the aforementioned c.v. and some acknowledgements.

With no preamble, introduction, or preface, the book launches right from the title pages and into the images. One of the most haunting for me is one of the first, Plate 11, Exit 66 off I-80, near Little America, Wyoming, 1995. To the left is a lonely and empty stretch of freeway, dimly lit by alien sodium-vapor streetlights in their sickly metallic orange pall. Above them glow green US-DOT highway signs, while in the distance beyond is a murky, snow-covered landscape of nothingness. It is the blue hour, after twilight, and the sky still glows faintly. The scene is bleak, remote, empty, and yet there is something majestic about it.

This brings up a troubling point. Skimming through the book, or skipping ahead to the essays, (which appear at the back, after one has been deluged in the imagery,) it becomes clear that this work is a critical one in nature. Brouws seems to be holding up to us a mirror, showing us the world we have made for ourselves. A theme of vacancy runs throughout. Many photographers try and find the scenes that make a location unique, the sense of place, but Brouws has done the opposite, photographing the things that make every American place the same. Yet critical tone or not, some images — like Plate 11 — are in spite of this moving and beautiful. Not for the first time this brings up the conundrum: how can an artist can apply arts meant to bring visual harmony and pleasure — composition — to a scene in which he or she finds folly? That Brouws shows us beauty as well as folly is either a signal that he also has been unable to reconcile this contradiction, or that he finds beauty even in the things that trouble him.

One thing that stands out in this body of work is the lack of people. Not for the first time, Brouws has shown an Hopperesque aversion to the human form. Of the over 100 images in the volume, only eight show signs of humanity in the frame. While Brouws clearly has a point he is trying to convey, is this fair? Sure, all art is biased, but I wonder if the work is slighting the landscape just a little bit by skin-flintingly erasing the human form from it. Who amongst us could love a world unpeopled? We see empty diners, empty sidewalks, empty streets. It should be no wonder that we find the scenes soulless and a little bit scary: we’re facing them alone.

The Hopper influence is especially strong with plates 127 and 137, the former of which much resembles Early Sunday Morning, and the latter of which seems to be recalling Approaching a City.

From the more technical side, Brouws likes to clip things off a lot. We see signs, cars, and (more rarely) body parts all clipped off and extended beyond the frame. He seems less interested in the place than the spaces between, often taking images of the voids than the forms that frame them. Most of the plates are richly colored, and when they aren’t, they are full of vast tonal ranges of subtle colors; although I am a big fan of black-and-white imagery, I can’t imagine any of these frames in monochrome. There’s a film noir influence too, with lots of murky, moody night images, with the edges of the picture disappearing into shadow and black.

The overriding sensation of the images in Approaching Nowhere is a sense of void, of nothingness. The decay and the bleakness has a certain beauty at times, but little of it is memorable. Even the most striking images — the night scenes — are forgotten once the book is closed. In their place is a sensation, rather than a visual, that sticks in the mind. It’s a kind of numbness. It is only then that it becomes evident: there is no single image that sums up Brouws’ work in Approaching Nowhere, because there is no single portrait of a place within the book. Rather, the entire book is one single portrait of a nowhere-land — the “nowhere” of the title.

The first of two essays in the back of the book is penned by William L. Fox. Fox gives us a brief and informative overview of the cultural geography of the book, as well as the photographic history of recording such landscapes.

Fox’s essay is followed by a longer one written by Brouws himself. Brouws writes with a knowledge and take on the landscape that places him more into the realm of social critic or urban planner pundit than photographer. He says little or nothing about the image making process, and a lot about his motives or vision. His essay is erudite and moving, although he occasionally slips too far into academia: Brouws may be one of the few writers I know to use the word “simulacrum” in a work meant for general readers. (It means, essentially, a front or a visual fake).

I can’t help but compare what Brouws writes here with David Plowden’s comments about his photography, and his awe of great machines or great bridges. With Brouws, however, there is little inspiration, little awe and wonder. Instead there is a drive to document a bitter reality. I am reminded, however, of Plowden’s reasons for quitting photography, his statement that the world he photographed is no longer there, and that this broke his heart. Perhaps Brouws’ bitter determination is but a reflection of this world.

The book is large and square format, so it will be a real pain to fit it on any normal bookshelf. It’s also just a tad uncomfortable to hold and flip through, making it more of a table book; this is disappointing, because my first instinct with these lonely images is to sit back and thimb through them in my lap, intimately. The upside of the size, however, is that you can truly get lost in the images, which for the most part are well reproduced. I do feel that some of the more subtle plates have a muddy look to them on closer inspection, but this is not to the point that it ruins the experience.

While I can’t state that the volume is a definitive portrait of America at the Millennium, it is without doubt a significant building block of work in the same vein as the photography of Robert Adams or even some of David Plowden’s grittier images, and a huge leap forward from Brouws’ previous books. Anyone who is serious about photographing the American landscape would be strongly advised to become familiar with this book.

Approaching Nowhere is available from Amazon as well as Powell’s Books.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

Here There Nowhere
Paintings by Michael Brophy with essays by Jonathan Raban and William L. Lang. OSU Press, 121 The Valley Library, Corvallis, OR 97331-4501; http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press; 12.0 x 12.0 x 0.25 in; paperbound; 60 pages, 20 color images; $25.00

The landscape of the Pacific Northwest is an ever-changing one, and so it should be no surprise that artistic views on that landscape have also changed radically over time. By the close of the last century, Oregon, once labelled the “Pacific Wonderland” on the state’s automobile license plates, had become a battlefield of ideas and ideals. Portland artist Michael Brophy has been trying to capture that essence of division and change over his career as a painter, with his most recent expression taking place in a series of large canvases all painted in 2007. Brophy calls this series Here There Nowhere, and it is the subject of a recent book by the same name produced by Oregon State University Press.

The beginning of the book form of Here There Nowhere is heralded with an essay about the history of landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest, written by Jonathan Raban. The essay, titled Battleground of the Eye, may seem familiar to readers; it was adapted from the introduction Raban wrote for 2001′s The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History, printed by Sasquatch Books. Although this is not new material, it helps to ground the painting series into the wider context of the artistic representation of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The only error I noted was that the Northern Pacific that entered Tacoma in 1883 was not the creation of the legendary James J. Hill, but of industrialist Henry Villard; a minor esoteric quibble perhaps, but it would not have taken much to fact check the essay one more time.

Following Raban’s essay come the paintings themselves. Brophy delivers us images on a heroic scale, reminiscent of revolutionary art from South America or Russia during the last century. These are grand canvases with grand ideas. And yet, the content chosen to express those ideas is inherently anti-heroic, mundane, dull. Brophy likes repeating patterns and vast expanses of subtleties over the boldness of an up-front statement. It doesn’t look like he’s trying to be pretty. Darkened fields, broad skies, blank cliff faces; they are all empty landscapes, and rarely is a human figure seen.

Michael Brophy, Crack of Dawn. 2007, oil on canvas, 74 by 80 inches.
Image courtesy Laura Russo Gallery.

It is perhaps the night images that stand out the most. Night Truck and Meadow both are evocative. The strongest of these is perhaps Crack of Dawn, a canvas with a deep wet cloud cover and a thin strip of dawn that any local will immediately recognize as the aggregate of countless mornings. Here we see how subtlety and muted color choices are key to understanding Brophy’s take on the landscape. Not all the night images work in the book, however: Full Dark is a study in subtleties that sadly does not translate well to print at all.

There is also an odd disjointed feel to the series. Some of the images have a dark, painterly, brooding approach, like Blowdown or Aftermath; the palette of the former reminds me of something from Carl Hall. On the flipside are strong traditionalist images such as Ruin, which feels sentimental in nature, or Day, with a painterly realism of something very tangible, in this case the rear of a semi-tractor driving some two-lane road to nowhere in the vast inland Pacific Northwest.

Michael Brophy, Ruin. 2007, oil on canvas, 74 by 80 inches.
Image courtesy Laura Russo Gallery.

If anything rescues the disjointedness, it is a common theme of nearly cinematic ideas; every time I flip through the images of the series I start feeling like I am looking at a storyboard for a movie about life in the forgotten flyover corners of the much over-hyped PNW paradise. What is amazing is that Brophy offers us a social commentary, a critique even, of how we view the world, and yet he does not choose the traditional route of painting scarred industrial landscapes or denuded forests or the like. Instead, he simply shows us that this is how we usually view the world, through mundane eyes that see only the same boring monotony. In a way, his critique runs deeper than the typical environmental or social commentary, pointing that the problem isn’t the clear-cut or the junk-pile, but instead it is our viewpoint. It is internal, it is within us.

Reproduction and presentation get fair marks. Brophy’s paintings are all very large works, standing at 74 by 80 inches. To stand before one is to be dwarfed, even for a tall person, and any attempt to depict this series with any justice on paper must be admired for audacity if nothing else. I don’t quite think that the publisher managed to pull this off; one square foot just can’t give you the sense of scale that standing before the real thing can. Further, I feel that some of the subtlety of the originals has been lost in the reproduction.

Following the images comes an essay by William L. Lang. Lang brings us back to the subject rather than the medium, concentrating not on Brophy’s paintings so much as on the story they are a part of. He ably discusses the relationship of humanity to the land of the region, with occasional examples pulled from Brophy’s work. Although a short and interesting read, I feel that Lang’s comments are in some ways duplicative of Raban’s text, while at the same time weaker and not relying enough on how an artist such as Brophy sees this world. What I wish had been included was a short piece by the artist himself, but such is not included in the book.

Overall, Here There Nowhere is a slim but important volume that highlights how landscape painting in the Pacific Northwest is evolving. For artists or students of art in the region, it would make a valuable addition to the bookshelf.

Here There Everywhere is available from Powell’s or Amazon, as well as directly from the publisher. Thanks to Laura Russo Gallery for supplying images and other assistance with this review.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

Highway: America’s Endless Dream
Photography by Jeff Brouws, text by Bernd Polster and Phil Patton. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 115 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011; http://www.hnabooks.com/category/home/88; 10.8 x 9.8 in; softcover; 160 pages, 100 color and 37 b/w photos; $29.95

The open road is one of the central myths of 20th century United States. What makes it so alluring? Perhaps its not that hard to imagine, and not really all that American: was not Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a road-trip story? Jeff Brouws is probably more well known recently for helping produce two books of excellent railroad images, the critically acclaimed Starlight on the Rails, and the Richard Steinheimer retrospective A Passion for Trains. But Jeff is a photographer in his own right, and has a fascination for road culture that comes shining through in Highway: America’s Endless Dream.

Highway is for the most part divided into six sections: an introduction, and three sections of photographs divided by two essays. Most of Brouws’ photos are shown full page, though there are a few pages that show two images per page at 1/4 page size, side-by-side. Additionally there are occasional pages of blank space, on which are centered quotes from notable individuals such as politicians, writers, and artists.

The book is a bit of an odd hybrid. At first glance it seems like it’s a photographer’s monograph. The presence of two lengthy essays written by authors other than the photographer, however, coupled with some odd inserted sections (such as a list of highway related literature, and another for road movies) makes it feel a bit more coffee-tableish. Not quite a in-depth history, not quite a shallow coffee table book, not quite a monograph; this split personality never stopped bugging me.

The photos, however, more than save it. Though not my first exposure to Brouws’ photography, it is my first book acquisition that focuses purely on his images. For a lover of Rust Belt America such as myself, his color plates are mesmerizing. From portraits of people and buildings to detail heavy images that border on abstract or Warholian pop-art, most of the images are depeopled, as if desolation is a synonym for the highway. And perhaps it is. Many of his images are striking compositions that rival any black-and-white mastery; few are the times I see color photography that feels this good.

The text is not as much of a match. The essays seem at times well researched, and yet elementary errors are made. For example, in the introduction, Bernd Polster calls Route 66 — finished in the 1930s — the “first road to traverse the continent”, totally ignoring the Lincoln Highway of fully twenty years prior. Phil Patton writes the first essay of the book, on the cultural story of the American highway; although an interesting topic the text has a jarring, uneven style, and as long as it is it would have felt better at the beginning of the book as an introductory text. The second essay is penned by Polster, and feels slightly duplicative of Patton’s work. Polster, however, dwells a great deal on Route 66, to the point of feeling like overstatement; for an essay that concentrates more on historical narrative, it’s hard to forgive such hyperbole.

Highway came out as a $30 book and feels like one. The thick softcover is given a good hand feel through the use of nearly full-width fold-back flaps. Paper stock is thick, and image reproduction is vivid, crisp, and clear, without being super-high gloss. Complimenting the rough-and-tumble images is a display font that has an edgy, gritty feel to it. It’s a durable, pretty book you’re not afraid to pick up and flip through, which combined with its excellent content makes it a better coffee table book than most true coffee table books will ever be.

The book is over ten years old now, having been published in 1997. Nevertheless, it remains a visually stimulating book, and a welcome addition to anyone who is interested in photography, pop culture, or the American highway. My slightly thumbed-through copy came used from Powell’s for $25; pristine copies seem to trade for about $50 these days.

Highway is available from Amazon, as well as from Powell’s Books on occasion.

From The Addendum @ route99west.com | © Alexander B. Craghead

Morning Rush, Portland, 2007; watercolor on paper, approxamately 16 x 25 inches.

Here is the jumping off point. Me being me, I didn’t quite paint it in weekly, zen-like meditative days as I had planned. Noooo. Of course not. Every electronic device was still up and running, there were papers tossed everywhere, and I couldn’t even resist putzing around with a few work projects. And on a day off! If I had stuck to it the first day, it would have been down less than 12 hours later. Did the painting improve or suffer due to the pause? I am not sure, tho the clipboard did make little marks on the paper edges. So be it; they’ll be safely matted out of view if (when) it is ever framed.

This is, of course, the jumping off point in a series for me. The first thought was to paint things that are “relevant” the my world — whatever that is — without being pandering, overly self-conscious, or overtly political. Good luck. Yet this desire has kicked me into thinking about works that I would not have once considered. Still, some guiding force must be in place, lest I begin to randomly paint all over the place, with no rhyme or reason. So I’ve decided to combine some passions, and make this a series on — might you guess it? Route 99 West. Now you say, this is a painting of a MAX train crossing the Steel Bridge in downtown Portland. What bearing does that have on 99W? But do not forget, the highway once went down Harbor Drive, where the Tom McCall Waterfront Park is now. Then it dashed up over the Steel Bridge, up Interstate Avenue, and joined 99E — the Grand Avenue / Union Avenue (later MLK Blvd) couplet — at the foot of the present I-5 interstate bridge. So, indeed, the industrial cathedral that is the Steel Bridge was once part of the vital link that was 99W.