Artist Profile: Michael Brophy

Brophy's painting, Trail 1, is the first new acquisition in MAC's art collection since 2016.

This is the ninth submission in our ongoing Artist Profile series featuring MAC’s extensive collection of Northwest art. Our interview began with a warm welcome from Michael Brophy in his spacious home studio in North Portland.

Not only is Brophy the youngest artist we have interviewed for this series, but he is also the sole artist born in Portland. With the exception of some time studying at the Studio Arts College International in Florence, Italy, as well as in London, he has lived in Oregon his entire life. Born in 1960, he attended the University of Oregon and received a bachelor’s in fine arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1985; he was also a member of the faculty there. He has been painting for almost four decades, creating the beauty, subtlety, and complexity of the Pacific Northwest landscape. He credits Lucinda Parker and Henk Pander as two of the Northwest artists who have influenced his work, and they are also in MAC’s collection.

The artist has indicated that most of his ideas and images come from “driving to and fro in the Pacific Northwest and walking up and down in it, scouting out landscapes and our often-fraught relations with the land. I’m interested in the landscape not merely as a backdrop or scenery but rather as a character with agency.” He traces this back to his childhood on the edges of Forest Park and exploring the Wildwood Trail. He was always alone and says, “This capacity for solitude turned out to be really useful for a painter.”

He showed us ink drawings from several of his countless sketchbooks, which are tucked into his trusty Filson shoulder bag. “I’ve always drawn with fountain pens, and I’ve had the black one for 25 years and the blue barreled one for about 20 years. I like the finality of the ink, putting a line down and having to react to, with, or against it.” In addition to photographs, these drawings are the source material for all his paintings. Works are constructed in his studio from gathered data in the form of photographs, sketches, and memories. He considers them a form of landscape portraiture.

The MAC Art Committee acquired Trail 1 from Russo Lee Gallery in early 2023. Brophy created the 54” x 60” oil on canvas in 2021, and it is the first new acquisition in the MAC collection since 2016. The work has been hung in the Reading Lounge, where it has a powerful presence. Brophy frequently explores the interconnectedness of human, natural, and cultural histories — the subtle, often violent interplay between humans and the planet. “There’s no ‘purity’ here; these pictures contain the mess of the world,” he states. Upon close inspection, one sees the bold paint strokes forming dominant abstract forms of lines and color, but from a distance they appear whole and realistic. His paintings are most powerful when viewed at a distance, presenting the viewer with a juxtaposition of beauty and destruction.

Brophy’s piece, Beaver Trade, has been selected to be part of a traveling exhibition put together by curators at four Western art museums, including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The exhibition is entitled Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea. It opens at the Smithsonian on July 28. Rick Bartow, Oregon’s late visionary Indigenous artist who is also in MAC’s collection, is honored as well with a haunting self-portrait, Buck.

In 1975, the Oregon State Legislature created the Percent for Art program, which sets aside 1% of state construction budgets for the acquisition of art. The state Capitol played a significant role as a cultural pioneer. Several of the artists in the MAC collection are represented in the expansion, including George Johanson, Lucinda Parker, Sally Haley, Terry Toedtemeier, James Lavadour, Louis Bunce, Manuel Izquierdo, Henk Pander, and Michael Brophy. The catalog was published in 2011, and Brophy’s oil painting, The Rising of the Moon 2, is one of the three works featured on the cover.

Brophy joined the Laura Russo Gallery (now the Russo Lee Gallery) in 1989 at the age of 29, and he continues to show there today. His work is in collections, including Microsoft, the Multnomah County Library Collection, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, OSU Library in Corvallis, and the City of Portland. Public commissions include Portland’s City Hall; the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in Wasco; Mt. Rainier High School in Des Moines, Washington; and most recently, a series of gouache paintings for the newly built Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland.

— Jeanne Neville and Nancy Smith