The rugged land of Texas' Big Bend region is legendary. Towering
mountains, austere desert, canyons, and rivers converge in a place
of beauty, loneliness, and adventure. Fort Worth artist Dennis
Blagg began painting landscapes from the Big Bend twenty years
ago. His breathtaking, near-photorealistic portraits of this remote
mountain desert are as big as the landscape itself—some of the
paintings are ten feet wide and four feet tall.
Through his work, Blagg brings the viewer both the beauty and
the forbidding nature of West Texas. Blagg has a fascination with
and love for his "ever-changing" subject. "The desert represents a
landscape of broken promise," Blagg explains, "yet it is a place of
vast spiritual content . . . an emptiness waiting to be filled . . . the
Big Bend offers many faces to be painted."
Big Bend Landscapes presents fifty of the artist's most powerful
color paintings along with twenty striking black-and-white
drawings. Blagg's brief commentaries on each work offer insight
into both his art and the land it captures.
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DENNIS BLAGG's work has appeared in more than thirty solo and
group exhibitions. His paintings can also be found in many public
and private collections, both in Texas and elsewhere, including the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Antonio Museum of Art;
the Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi; and the Fort Worth
Modern Art Museum. Representative pieces of his work were
published recently in The Artist & the American Landscape (1998).
This is his first book.
Number Twelve: Joe and Betty Moore Texas Art Series
What people are saying about this book
". . . an astonishing collection of views, paintings so realistic that
you will take them for landscape photographs."—Buckskin Bulletin,
Fall 2007
"Texas readers will be especially interested, but Blagg's desert-
scapes have universal appeal . . . an effective presentation of the
work of a talented contemporary artist whose affection for the West
is unmistakeable."—CHOICE
