Artists Spotlight: Michael Brophy
Michael Brophy, painter
Recipient of 2003 RACC Visual Arts Fellowship; Artwork in the Public Art Collection: Visual Chronicle of Portland 2000-01; Blanchard Building, % for Art, 2001; Portland City Hall, % for Art, 1998; Multnomah County Courthouse, % for Art, 1993.
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| Michael Brophy's Sunday, 2004 |
Michael Brophy is a committed painter, dedicated to art as a tool of inquiry. He has a mastery of the medium and has engaged in the exploration over a long period of time. His work continues an Oregon tradition of landscape painting and pushes it to new levels. On the one hand, his paintings clearly celebrate the Northwest's natural beauty, capturing the sublimity of mountaintop vistas and endless green. But in numerous paintings of clear-cut timber stands, he portrays our forests as sites of desolation, rather than idyllic landscapes. His paintings set out to expose the ecological aftermath of Manifest Destiny: the "colonization" and subsequent destruction of millions of acres of virgin-growth forests. In all his work he comes across as a painter of anti-heroic subject matter on a heroic scale, wittily and effectively chronicling the fate of our environment.
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| Photo courtesy of KATU TV |
On September 23, 2007 a serious fire burned both Michael's apartment and studio at N.Williams Avenue and NE Going Street. He and his wife, Holly, suffered a total loss but firefighters managed to save some paintings. Others are water damaged.
Michael was to have had 2 consecutive solo shows in December and January at Laura Russo Gallery. The new works were often radically different than his previous work and were some of the strongest he done to date. If any are destroyed it will be a terrible loss.
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| Michael Brophy's Scenes from an Imaginary Western #3, 2006 |
A fund to assist the couple has been established by the arts community to send contributions to the Regional Arts & Culture Council, 108 N.W. Ninth Ave., Suite 300, Portland, OR 97209-3318. Donations are tax-deductible. Fire also destroyed the studio and apartment of another artist, Michael J. Wilson. Click here to read more.
During March and April, 2008 paintings of Michael Brophy, a 2003 RACC Visual Arts Fellowship recipient, will be on view at the Gerding Theater at the Armory, in conjunction with Portland Center Stage’s world premiere staging of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. 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.
Michael's work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft Corporation, and many others. He is represented by Laura Russo Gallery where more of his work can be seen.
Contact Information:
website: www.laurarusso.com/artists/brophy.html
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RACC Staff to Contact
Mary Bauer
Communications Associate
503.823.5426
mbauer@racc.org
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