Book Description
The striking landscape of the Pacific Northwest has inspired painters to put brush to canvas ever since the first European explorers sailed into local waters. A continuous, robust, and evolving artistic view of the region is represented in the 140 paintings selected for this beautiful book. Never before gathered in a single place, here are Albert Bierstadt, Sydney Laurence, Emily Carr, Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and George Tsutakawa, among many others--all taking account of the water, sky, mountains, air, and light of the Pacific Northwest. With a probing introduction by Jonathan Raban, this book amounts to a unique and irresistible painted history.


About the Author
Kitty Harmon, author of Up to No Good: The Rascally Things Boys Do, was the founding director of Northwest Bookfest. She lives in Seattle. Jonathan Raban is the author of many award-winning books, most recently Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. He lives in Seattle.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Landscape painting is a natural American art, and no area evokes it more than the lavish scenes of the Pacific Northwest. This detailed and generously illustrated history of the wide painted vistas of the region is notable for the range of its offerings. Featured artists include Albert Bierstadt, Sydney Laurence, Emily Carr, Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and George Tsutakawa.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The striking landscape of the Pacific Northwest has inspired painters to put brush to canvas ever since the first European explorers sailed into local waters. A continuous, robust, and evolving artistic view of the region is represented in the 140 paintings selected for this beautiful book. Never before gathered in a single place, here are Albert Bierstadt, Sydney Laurence, Emily Carr, Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and George Tsutakawa, among many others—all taking account of the water, sky, mountains, air, and light of the Pacific Northwest. With a probing introduction by Jonathan Raban, this book amounts to a unique and irresistible painted history.

SYNOPSIS

The maritime, wet, gray, cloudy, forested, vast, mountainous, desert, dry, empty, rural, and urban experiences of the Pacific Northwest are captured in a survey of evocative landscape paintings, depicted here in good color reproductions. The 131 paintings represented span the earliest made of the area, in 1778, to works from 1999. Jonathan Raban, a free-lance writer, has written an introduction that touches on the biographies of the artists and larger artistic movements as well as the social and political context of the work. An alphabetical list of the artists with a short biography for each concludes the volume.