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

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 A Desert Journal, Blagg has chosen fifty of his most powerful color paintings and twenty black-and-white drawings and has written brief comments for each, offering insight into both the art and the land it captures. Ron Tyler of the Texas State Historical Association has contributed an introductory essay on the Big Bend.