Portland painter Michael Brophy eyes the big picture

The large oil paintings Michael Brophy was working on last year before a nighttime fire blasted through his house and studio seem oddly prophetic now. Brophy's vision of the Northwest landscape has always tended toward the subtly cataclysmic: forest clear-cuts, burned-out shells of buildings, ominous skies, the log-strewn aftermath of unspecified disaster. In Brophy's current show "Here — There" at G. Gibson Gallery, the darker aspect of his paintings gets more personal. Five big oils were among those salvaged from the studio after the September fire. One, called "Pallet Fire," depicts a vertical sweep of flames that has little effect on the surrounding night.

The artist restored the paintings, which were marred by smoke and water. Fortunately, the work had been photographed before the fire. You can see them as they were in a new catalog, "Here There Nowhere," available at the gallery.

Brophy is a wonderful painter, period. But it's the sensibility behind the paint that makes him stand out. The large oils are pure drama, taking landscape to the brink of abstraction with vast expanses of sky and land that only the texture of grass or a tangle of logs delineates finally into recognizable form. In "Full Dark," he references the early 20th-century breakthrough monochrome paintings of Kasimir Malevich with a canvas that reads as solid black — almost. Only a whisper of light and shadow carry through to reveal some tufts of grass at our feet, the shrug of a mountain range in the distance.

After the fire, with no studio, Brophy began to work on a more portable scale. Carrying on that theme of "Full Dark," he painted a group of nine knockout gouaches. Even though the images are small, about 10 by 11 inches, they rouse a sense of vast emptiness. Looking at them is like standing alone in the desert at night. A lone car streaks through the dark like a comet, or the moon peers down. Stars cluster in the black reaches of space. It's enough.

Another series of gouache-on-paper paintings, "Firewall," directly considers the fire at Brophy's Portland house and studio. The pictures seem to be his way of processing the trauma, which damaged property but, fortunately, did not take any lives. (I'm told the blaze started from embers left untended outside a neighbor's house that smoldered for a long time, then ignited and spread.) Another, more extensive group of recent gouaches, "What Did You See There," is like a collection of snapshots from a road trip. Unlike most snapshots, though, Brophy's are well-chosen. Each scene is desolate and highly charged; I found them all irresistible.

One earlier oil painting in the show, the 2005 "Left Behind," sums up the deep discord between us and our planet that permeates Brophy's work. The image is a crowd of humans, clustered as far as the eye can see, facing an uncertain sky. They are waiting. And the feeling of futility in that wait is overwhelming. "Left Behind" reminds me of those awful pictures of the U.S. abandoning Vietnam, helicoptering away from the embassy for the last time, with a desperate crowd lunging for a handhold on the levitating aircraft. I imagine each person after it left, still hoping that there would be another airlift and that he would be among those to clamber on and fly to safety. In Brophy's "Left Behind," you sense the doom not of a city or country, but of a whole planet.

Ideas fuel Brophy's paintings, yet it's the feelings they convey that matter most. His work gets you in the pit of the stomach. It generates a sense of isolation, impending terror, a resonance of awe and wonder at the smallness of our individual lives — and even our collective life as humans — when measured on the scale of the universe. Brophy's art, now more than ever, reminds us of the big picture, and that our daily upsets over a rash of cold weather, a traffic ticket, an unexpected bill, are small indeed.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com