Notes on a Shared Landscape: Making Sense of the American West

Bayles, David

ISBN 10: 0961454741 / ISBN 13: 9780961454746

Published by Image Continuum Press, 2005

About this Item

VG hardcover in VG jacket. 2005. SIGNED by AUTHOR on half title page w/NO inscription. Photos throughout. Pages all clean/unmarked. Mild edge wear. Binding solid. Jacket with light soiling/scuffing. Solid. 111 pp. Seller Inventory # L04827

Bibliographic Details

Title: Notes on a Shared Landscape: Making Sense of...

Publisher: Image Continuum Press

Publication Date: 2005

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

In his best-selling Art and Fear, David Bayles (with Ted Orland) closely examined personal and autobiographical episodes in search of general truths about artmaking. Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West.

When European Americans “discovered” the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day.

Bayles writes: “. . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no one really wanted to, when there was every chance to get it right, when voices of caution were constantly raised, when what needed to be done was frequently obvious, and when, occasionally, we did get it right (think: National Parks).”

Notes on a Shared Landscape engages the issues that make the West the West—widely ranging over the autobiographical and the cultural, the ecological and the epistemological, the cow and the potato. This is an intensely personal book, and though the Western library is huge, there is not another book like it. Much of the text unfolds in Yellowstone, where Bayles writes:

In the Lamar valley of the Yellowstone, beaver gnaw the trunks of cottonwoods, elk browse their leaves. The shadows are long, even in summer. Even so, it is just another place. In it, just as elsewhere, we see the marks of our own hands faintly because we don’t have to know very much about the land we live in, because we are equally a part of and apart from nature, and because there is hardly any moment when humans are more delusional than when self recognition is required.

About the Author:

Bestselling author of "Art & Fear."