A book this smart
makes you wonder why the undertaking hasn’t been done before:
telling the story of a region through the paintings it has
inspired. No matter, because Sasquatch Books has just released
The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted
History, an excellently assembled book edited by
Northwest Bookfest founder Kitty Harmon. It presents canvases that
capture and preserve some portion of the landscapes of Washington
and Oregon, and it begins with the “first white artist to unpack
his paintbox in the Pacific Northwest,” John Webber, who
accompanied Captain Cook’s voyage in 1778.
From
Webber’s detailed depictions of the natives, their canoes and the
villages that the voyage encountered, to the 19th century romantic
painters’ grand landscapes, to the impressionistic renderings of
the Northwest School in the 1950s, these paintings don’t tell the
stories of the land as much as they do the particular historical
and cultural contexts that Euro-Americans carried with them on
their way out West.
Jonathan Raban, in his introduction, writes that “landscape is land
shaped – land subordinated to a vision or use.” This historical
survey demonstrates how pervasive the struggle has been to tame the
land, to take the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and frame it
in relation to industry, product and progress. Also quite evident
from these paintings is the long-running battle between developer
and environmentalist.
Sometimes the mountains,
forests and waters of the Northwest are used as natural symbols of
the region’s awe-inspiring beauty, while other times these same
features are shown to be seemingly inexhaustible resources capable
of feeding the logging, mining, fishing and farming industries that
have been essential parts of the region since white people moved
in. Through the eyes of many different artists – the lesser-known
as well as the famous, and women and Asian-Americans as well as
white men – we view the Pacific Northwest across the ages and see
it in new and wonderful ways. The Pacific Northwest
Landscape: A Painted History; edited by Kitty Harmon,
Sasquatch Books, 2001. Paperback: $21.95. 144 pages, illustrated.
Copyright © 2002 HCN and Martin
Christian
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Artists paint a Pacific Northwest history.
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