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THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
LANDSCAPE: A PAINTED HISTORY
Kitty Harmon, editor; introduction by Jonathan Raban
(Sasquatch Books, 144 pages)
Slightly more than two centuries have passed since the first European
artists began trying to tame the Northwestern landscape with paint. Those
first painters, often accompanying explorers such Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, set out to record and report what they saw for a distant audience
unlikely ever to see the original. Today's Northwest landscape painters
have a different mission: to interpret the natural world for an audience
that already lives here. In both cases, landscape painting performs a vital,
if often underrated, task: helping us to clarify the way we look at the
natural world.
This small book provides the raw material for a brief but inclusive survey
of landscape painting in the Northwest since John Webber made careful
watercolor sketches of Vancouver Island for Captain James Cook in 1778.
Those early sketches are largely anthropological. Webber was most fascinated
with the American Indian inhabitants he found here; in his "A View
in Ship Cove, Nootka Sound," the trees, mountains, sky and waterway
serve as little more than conventional backdrop for the expedition's ship
and canoes full of visiting Indians. He may have drawn the scenery entirely
from imagination. Skip ahead a century, though, and William Samuel Parrot's
1880 oil painting of `The Three Sisters From Clear Lake' contains next
to no human presence. The three snow-clad Cascade peaks loom unnaturally
large over the lake, which has not yet been turned into the tourist resort
it is today.
Sharply delineated, monochromatic white and gray, the mountains
seem a separate reality from the dark, Hudson Valley School landscape
of the lakeshore. Within another century, of course, impressionism will
steal the show. American impressionist Childe Hassam actually visited
Eastern Oregon and painted in the desert here; other, homegrown artists
also adopted the European movement's techniques. Perhaps the most visually
exciting Northwest landscapes spring from the modernist painting of the
1920s to 1940s, including everything from federally financed works to
the magical realism of British Columbia's Emily Carr. Her lush and brooding
work depicts a Northwest forest of dangerous power; she described the
woods thus:
"Nobody goes there. Why? Few have anything to go for. The loneliness
repels them, the density, the unsafe hidden footing, the dank smells,
the great quiet, the mystery, the general mix-up (tangle, growth, what
may be hidden there), the insect life. They are repelled by the awful
solemnity of the age-old trees."
The hardest period for any history to focus on is the present,
though this book does an admirable job of trying. From James Lavadour's
brooding work to Henk Pander's heroic look at "Burning the New Carissa,"
we are treated to a quick overview of what some of the region's best known
artists are doing. Is anything missing? Landscape is, by definition, a
conservative form - divorce it too far from representation and it's no
longer landscape. Abstraction is probably out, then. But you'll look in
vain here for any trace of the conceptual energy that's informed much
contemporary art work around the world.
A nice plus to the book is a biographical glossary, with short entries
for each artist. Jonathan Raban's introduction is adequate but bland.
The best part of the book is, of course, the art itself. Landscape is,
of necessity, local art. In a world that worships national and international
celebrity, landscape can be created only by artists who live or work here
- not in New York or Paris or anywhere else.
This book makes a nice primer to the art of here.
Nov. 4, 2001
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