Man's mark on the land.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

SALEM - One of the most haunting buildings ever built in Oregon was the Forestry Pavilion, a faux Greek temple - constructed of unpeeled old growth logs - that stood at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland.

Old photographs capture the building's outlandish ambition and pretense: Here in the Northwest, it seemed to say, we are subduing raw nature to construct a new civilization worthy of ancient Athens and Sparta.

Painter Michael Brophy is old enough to claim a dim memory of seeing the pavilion before it burned down in 1964. And the ghost of that pavilion seems to infuse a fine new show of the Portland artist's work at the Hallie Ford Museum through August.

The pavilion itself appears in only one painting. The main image of Brophy's giant triptych, "The Royal Court," focuses on the temple's interior.

In the nearly 8-foot-by-8-foot central painting, a slender figure of a man, who could be either a pioneer or a 21st century time traveler, stands partly obscured by one of the temple's massive log columns.

The man seems lost in the cavernous room, a little uncomfortable next to the captive trees that surround him. He glares at the viewer like an out-of-sorts tourist posing for a photograph. The giant trees may have been tamed and cut for a building, the painting seems to say, but their wild presence is still intimidating and awe-inspiring.

Brophy's work owes a debt to Salvador Dali, the surrealist, and one to Albert Bierstadt, the romantic painter of American landscapes, though Brophy is certainly neither of these artists. He leavens his landscape painting with a light ironic undertone, reminding us always that he - and we - are an inextricable part of the natural landscape, whether we like to admit it or not.

"National Recreation Area," a roughly 6 1/2 -foot-by-7 1/2 -foot painting done in 2002, shows a lone golfer as he tees off from atop a desert ridge. The ball flies, unseen, into a spectacular eroded landscape that, in most art of the past century, would be populated, if at all, with charismatic cowboys, Indians and wild animals.

The golfer, though, is suburban. He's a baseball-cap-wearing, faceless, anti-heroic everyman. He appears, almost always viewed from behind, as a narrator in much of Brophy's work. He may be Brophy himself. Or he may be us.

Brophy is a great painter of clear-cuts. He occasionally treats them with an editorializing hand, as in "Heart of the Cascades," which shows a typical Northwestern stump farm viewed from behind a green stage curtain, as though a beautiful display has just been unveiled.

But he is capable of much more subtle work. "January," a 1997 painting owned by the Tacoma Art Museum, is as lyrical a landscape as you're likely to find; it shows a wet logging road, greasy and gray in the Oregon rain, winding through the ruined landscape past stumps, a slash pile and fragments of a cut log.

The painting needs no gimmicks to convey the somber and terrible beauty of the chaos left by industrial logging; the scene has the look of war devastation and ancient ruins rolled into one.

Brophy's most intriguing work is a series of portraits of dead trees. He approaches this work absolutely straight-on, and it's among the strongest in the show.

These simple, 8-foot-tall paintings bear names such as ``Snag I'' and "Portrait." They are nearly life-size images of sections of snags painted as if the trees had been invited into the artist's studio to sit for a formal portrait. You can see and practically touch every bit of broken bark, every woodpecker hole, every bit of charred and rotten wood.

Two of the snag paintings fill out the "Royal Court" triptych of the Forestry Pavilion, so that the long-lost temple built from now-disappearing old growth is flanked on each side by stately portraits of now-dead trees.

It's an image that is strange and beautiful, like all of Brophy's work.

EXHIBIT REVIEW

The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy

What: Recent paintings by the Portland artist

Where: Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University, 700 State St., Salem

When: Through Aug. 27

Admission: Adults $3, seniors and students $2, ages 12 and younger free.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

CAPTION(S):

Above: Like many of the paintings in this Michael Brophy exhibit, ``Measure'' (2000) is a large canvas, 7 feet tall ``January'' (from 1997) is a landscape of logging. Usually at the Tacoma Art Museum, it has been loaned to the Salem show. It, too, is a large painting, 8 feet wide. Michael Brophy's painting ``National Recreation Area'' puts a suburban sort of figure into a vast and traditional Western landscape. The painting is part of Brophy's exhibit at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem. EXHIBIT REVIEW The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy What: Recent paintings by the Portland artist Where: Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University, 700 State St., Salem When: Through Aug. 27 Admission: Adults $3, seniors and students $2, ages 12 and younger free. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.