Big Bend Landscapes

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-photographic portraits of this remote mountain desert are as big as the landscape itself-some paintings are ten feet wide and four feet tall.

Through his work, Blagg brings the viewer both the beauty and the hostility 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."

For this book, Blagg has chosen fifty of his most powerful color paintings and twenty striking black-and-white drawings. Blagg's brief commentaries on each work offer insight into both the art and the land it captures. Rom Tyler of the Texas State Historical Association has contributed and introductory essay on the Big Bend.