Seen in Passing

“Some people think they have to go to exotic places or the far ends of the earth to find excitement. I’ve always liked the idea of finding interest at home; just walking around the block can be an experience.” – Chuck Forsman

Colorado artist and photographer Chuck Forsman brings three paintings and more than 50 black and white photographs from two bodies of work, Western Rider and Walking Magpie, for this exhibition. Western Rider looks at Western landscapes from the most familiar vantage point of the present age—the driver’s seat of a car—Forsman surveys places that range from Indian reservations to urban oil refineries, from a cemetery in the famous copper smelting town of Anaconda, Montana, to a gleaming reservoir in Hells Canyon, Idaho. Walking Magpie takes a coast-to-coast inventory of American landscapes as Forsman saw the country while walking his dog Magpie.

For more than 40 years, Chuck Forsman has been a pioneering landscape artist whose paintings and photographs have engaged environmental and land-use issues from unique personal viewpoints. Forsman is credited as being among the first contemporary artists to link landscape painting and environmental issues. His eye for form, detail, and the occasional quiet joke challenge ordinary perceptions of landscape and community and awaken a new sense of how and where we live. With few exceptions, his photographs concentrate on everyday places rather than on scenic attractions. He stays away from lenses or vantage points that distort how things appear so that his subjects look much the way anyone else would find them.

A catalog featuring Chuck Forsman’s series Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash is available at The Shop at the Denver Art Museum.