A Mind on Fire

Tacoma Art Museum made him a star with the 2005 book and show The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy, and Brophy’s phoenixlike imagination dominates Tacoma’s 9th Northwest Biennial Exhibition.

Fire has been kind to Michael Brophy, though it didn’t seem that way the morning seventeen months ago when he almost burned to death in his bed. The fire helped Brophy become the star of the Northwest Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum, the most important competitive exhibition for Washington and Oregon artists. Singled out as an Albert Bierstadt for our times in Jonathan Raban’s 2001 Atlantic story on Northwest landscape painting (“Brophy has achieved the ambition of every nineteenth-century Romantic painter”), he’s enjoyed a deluge of hard-won good luck: a Pollock-Krasner grant, solo shows that drew rave reviews, work in two national shows, three books and the album art for The Woods, indie rock band Sleater-Kinney’s last, perhaps greatest record.

Brophy, 48, is famous in many circles for the ten years he spent capturing, on vast canvases, epic visions of the natural landscape we’ve devastated with clear-cuts and power lines. His great theme seized him while driving to visit his parents on the Oregon coast, taking back roads to avoid the highway’s tedium. Instead of the usual decorous curtain of trees, he saw the raw remains of logging:

“It’s this outdoor factory — these forests that had been cut like four times. I took those clear-cuts, the stuff that was tossed aside and ignored — ‘Oh, we don’t want to look at that!’ — behind the tree curtains they leave. Shameful secret! See, I wanted to take that thing that was hidden and I just wanted to light it up. Just make it grand.” His sardonic sendup of nineteenth-century romanticism transformed the way many people look at Northwest nature art.

On the eve of the 2007 blaze that claimed his Portland home and studio, he was still feeling the aftershock of his landmark 2005 show curated by TAM’s Rock Hushka. It was a triumphant career capstone, but also unsettling — like a lifetime achievement award for someone only halfway through life’s dark wood. “In a weird way,” says Brophy, talking in the kitchen of the house next door to the one that burned down, “those midcareer retrospectives really kind of blow people out of the water. So I had this strange feeling — it’s like, what am I, dead?”

Granted, he was gratified by the resonant statement that made his name. But he thought to himself, “OK, I guess I’ve said what I have to say about that.” He could have become like so many local artists, who hit a creative vein and then stick to the same shtick unto death. Instead, he wanted to strike out in new directions, and not to let success confine him. It was a great break, getting compared to Bierstadt by Raban, the only national writer who ever wrote about local art (except Tom Robbins, who only got famous when he quit criticism for fiction). But when you ask whether Brophy sees himself in that nineteenth-century line of descent, he stammers, “Well, it’s funny — yeah — those things. I mean, it’s, mmm, you know really it — ah, God, how does it work? It isn’t so con — like I don’t have a strategy like that.” You hear a man trying not to sound gracelessly ungrateful, but to escape his eminent reputation.

His first step into the future was a 2007 oil painting called Meadow, a rather jokey composition featuring Bigfoot about to back out of a shaft of sunlight into shadowy forest, inspired by the iconic home-movie snippet beloved by Sasquatch believers. “I was just frustrated,” he says. “I was painting these woods again and I really felt that I didn’t want to do that. So I just painted it completely black.”

He sanded down and painted over Sasquatch, realizing what interested him was not the figure or the narrative but the transition from light to a Rothko darkness, or a Reinhardt space of darkness and deeper darkness. “A lot of times just destroying something is the best thing you could possibly do, because it really broke it open, and then really I started to work more in a reductionist fashion. Even though there was still representation. This isn’t an abstract painting, but it’s tending more toward that idea.”

Moving away from the overharvested environs of his standard iconography was a good move. For one thing, Brophy sometimes handles the figure awkwardly, in a way that reminds me of Edward Hopper. And his ideas can be thumpingly didactic (which helps make them so popular). Renouncing his magic accessed a whole new, more richly suggestive magic. “Rather than like, the organizing principle being linear and drawing all this stuff,” he says, he began working with ambiguity, spontaneity, “big wet areas of paint. So it really got me energized.

“And then the fire hit.”

“I run outside, see [flames] climbing the walls. I empty the entire fire extinguisher. It doesn’t do anything. So I run back upstairs, I’m screaming my head off to Holly."

Around 5:30 a.m. on September 23, 2007, Brophy awoke in the apartment above his studio with a groggy sense that something was wrong. It was odd for him to be awake at all at that hour — he typically rises at ten and gets to work by noon.

“There was a strange light,” he recalls. “It was not quite dawn.” (His painter’s sensitivity to light may be what saved his life.) “I’m disoriented, I walk down the stairs. It’s hard to breathe.” A weird orange/red glow shone through the wall’s one small window. He grabbed a fire extinguisher. “I run outside, see [flames] climbing the walls. I empty the entire fire extinguisher. It doesn’t do anything. So I run back upstairs, I’m screaming my head off to Holly [Cundiff, his girlfriend] to call 911. Holly was dead out to the world — she was just completely knocked out asleep. Disoriented, she can’t see anything, it’s totally smoky. So I just grabbed her arm and kept screaming, ‘LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO!’ Then it’s just a blur. We were outside wearing hardly anything and the place goes up in a big pillar of fire.”

Brophy was struck by the sight of a fireman sitting on a hose to keep it pointing at the studio, riding the elemental force that soaked Brophy’s home of sixteen years and his new paintings while they burned.

Like the man said, sometimes destruction is a good thing in an excellent disguise. After the fire, Brophy put his mind back together by painting. “It’s powerful stuff. I really do feel it saved my life.” Even losing his big studio, a converted 1903 grocery, revivified his art.He worked in the little kitchen next door, shifting from big oils to small, 10-by-11-inch goauches with imagery packed tight as a golf ball. He painted “the barbecue of mayhem,” the neighbor’s barbecue whose coals, firemen told him, were either dumped or accidentally knocked over, igniting the roots of bamboo trees, which transmitted the fire towards Brophy’s wall for about a day and a half, like a slow-burning fuse.

Brophy painted the legendary parties he used to throw in the studio, and the building in each phase of its life: pristine, engulfed in flames and, most brilliantly, from inside the charred, cooled ruin, natural light peeking through the ragged holes. He called one series Firewall, inspired by the building code’s requirement for a wall that can hold back fires for at least an hour. “The firewall is about protection from the fire. Psychologically. I didn’t have any firewall — it was an old building so there wasn’t any of that code stuff. The process of painting was protecting me from this whole disaster. Except for my dad dying, this was the worst year of my life.”

But it sure was good for inspiration. Instead of laboriously crafting a painting for months, he started painting one a day. He went back to his earliest inspiration — before his visits to the Prado, his idolization of Tintoretto and Guston, Carleton Watkins and Winslow Homer, right back to Jack Kirby, the creator of Iron Man (and, aptly, the Human Torch). “I wrote him a letter when I was like twelve. I sent about five or six of my drawings of his drawings. He was at DC in the early ’70s, working on the New Gods. I got a notecard: ‘You’re learning from the greatest school of all — the comics themselves! Keep going! — Jack Kirby.’”

One Firewall painting, a homage to Kirby’s phenomenal explosions (“they’re totally better than movies!”), shows Brophy’s studio blowing up (as it did not in real life). “In the gouaches you see the influence of my past copying comics. The freedom of this little format — it dries so fast!”

Critics and audiences went nuts over Brophy’s new art. Even Seattle P-I critic Regina Hackett renounced her longtime loathing of Brophy, “a glorified illustrator” whose “awkward versions of land besieged by logging and littering were one-of-a-kind posters for a point of view.” She had refused to see his 2005 Tacoma Art Museum retrospective. But the new works — both the brooding dark abstractish oils and the whipcrack gouaches — she found “thrilling.” I second the critic (Jenny Shank of New West Book Review) who found Brophy’s 2007 oil painting Night Truck a worthy homage to Hopper, though bereft of the human figure and possessed by the idea of enveloping darkness.

Michael Brophy doesn’t feel like he’s dead anymore. A wall grid’s worth of his gouaches dominates a wall at the Northwest Biennial, and he’s within days of reoccupying his rebuilt studio, which allows in far more light than the old one. Even outside, you can smell that invigorating new-paint smell. He’s got a spring in his step that I’ve never seen in the dozen years I’ve known him.

He shoos his kitty away from the gouaches on the kitchen table — “Don’t even THINK of doing that, cat!” — and escorts me out to my car. He gestures to the neighbor’s place, the guy whose barbecue coals caused the whole thing. “The doof that did it is still renting there. I feel like I should probably thank him now.”

Art (clockwise from top): Firewall Painting #1, 2008, gouache on paper, 13 x 14 inches; Firewall Painting #3 and #2, 2008; Kitchen Painting #18, 2008, gouache on paper, 13 x 14 inches. Photos by NessPace.