$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with jacket
136 pages with 79 photographs reproduced as duotones
11.0″ x 9.0″ (horizontal/landscape)
ISBN: 978–1–938086–11–3
Published Fall 2013
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Denver Art Museum.
Book Events:
January 15, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Book signing and talk
Boulder Book Store, Boulder, CO (click for more information)
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Rocky Mountain Land Series Author Talk, Tattered Cover Book Store, Historic LoDo, Denver, CO
Exhibitions:
Opens to the public: Sunday November 17, 2013
A Chuck Forsman Retrospective
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Click to read the DAM On & Off the Wall article on the exhibition
Click to read the Denver Post article on the exhibition
Listen to an interview with Chuck Forsman on Colorado Public Radio
by Chuck Forsman
introduction by Eric Paddock
Winner of a Silver Medal for a 2013 IndieFab Book of the Year.
Nominated for a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award.
People love dogs, and dogs love people. Walking a dog is one of the most visible and mutually beneficial manifestations of that bond. It is a ritual steeped in affection and obligation. It doesn’t have a day off. It doesn’t pay the bills or clean the dishes or do the laundry. Still, people and dogs alike gain the benefits of exercise, socialization, shared experiences, and observations. Another benefit, often overlooked, is the pleasure of mutually indulging in a trait that ordinary dogs share with extraordinary people: curiosity. This book is, in many ways, an ode to curiosity.
Walking Magpie is about a dog and what a dog sees. It is also a work of serious photography by a well-known and pioneering landscape artist: Chuck Forsman, who, for more than forty years, has been a keen observer of the interface between landscape and culture as expressed through his paintings and photographic art. As a result, Forsman often goes to places that might not be on everyone’s radar screen.
In this book, Forsman took his Leica camera with him during his walks with Magpie, the family dog. Often these walks were in the neighborhood and surrounding hills where Forsman lives: near the Flatirons in Boulder. But Magpie joins Forsman on other adventures, from Alaska and the Northwest Territories of Canada to Florida, Ohio, and New York City. The intent is to turn these experiences into art. With each picture we sense mystery rather than clarity, questions about place rather than answers. We hardly can know what a dog knows, but with this book we can appreciate better what a dog sees and senses and experiences, helping the human and canine imagination to meld, at least a little.
About
About the Author
Chuck Forsman was born in Idaho in 1944 and raised in eastern Oregon and northern California. He received his B.A. in art in 1967 and his M.F.A. in painting 1971 from the University of California at Davis. Forsman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967 and sent to Vietnam in 1968–1969, where he served as an illustrator and photo correspondent and earned a Bronze Star Medal. After Vietnam he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1970 and in 1971 began to teach painting at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received three Faculty Fellowships and retired in 2008 as a professor of art. He has also received three National Endowment for the Arts grants, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and numerous other awards and honors. Forsman’s work is included in more than twenty permanent collections, including the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Denver Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Wichita Art Museum, and Yellowstone Art Museum, among others. He has three published books: Arrested Rivers (University Press of Colorado, 1994), a book of his paintings that are critical of the over-damming of the West; Western Rider: Views from a Car Window (Center for American Places, 2003), a book of black-and-white photographs taken throughout the West; and Along Buddha’s River (2011), a self-published book of color photographs taken by Forsman and his daughter, Shannon Forsman, while they followed the Mekong River from near its source on the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea. Chuck Forsman continues to produce paintings and photographs from his home in Boulder, Colorado, based on travels primarily in the American West and Southeast Asia. Mr. Forsman is credited with being among the first artists to link landscape painting and environmental issues.
About the Essayist
Eric Paddock, a fifth-generation Coloradoan, was born in Boulder in 1954 and raised there. He graduated from The Colorado College in 1976 and received his M.F.A. in photography from Yale University in 1982. Since 2008 he has been Curator of Photography at the Denver Art Museum, where he has organized solo exhibitions of work by Edward Ranney, Robert Benjamin, Garry Winogrand, Laura Letinsky, and Chuck Forsman, among others. Mr. Paddock also curated the Denver presentation of the Yale University Art Gallery’s traveling exhibition, “Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs.” From 1982 to 2008 he was Curator of Photography and Film at the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, where he curated more than two dozen exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography about the American West. He is the author of Belonging to the West (Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1996), and his photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Mr. Paddock lives in Denver.
Slide Show
Praise
“Dogs by nature take indiscriminate interest. We cannot as their companions fully share in this, for reasons of social propriety and intellect and conscience, but their openness reignites by example the potential in us to feel affection for the world. Chuck Forsman’s dog ranges enthusiastically through the often seedy little landscapes of a compromised America, but as we watch we escape a measure of our boredom and embarrassment with the country. Saved by a nose.”
―Roberts Adams, photographer and author of The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, 1964–2009
“Between the wild and the domestic, there is the dog. Chuck Forsman’s mutt, Magpie, lets us enter that betweenness where people and the environment cooperate and collide, a raggedy border where only a four-legged guide could walk unselfconsciously and an unmarked territory where only an artist could catch the complex scent.”
―Rev. Gary Kowalski, author of Blessings of the Animals: Celebrating Our Kinship with All Creation
“Walking Magpie is a magnificent book in which renowned artist/photographer Chuck Forsman and his cool companion-dog, Magpie, take us on a wonderful and beautifully illustrated journey into a wide variety of landscapes, with which many readers will be unfamiliar or surprised by, from parking lots, construction sites, and the spaces between dumpsters to spectacular wilderness, urban parks, and city streets. Far too many people today are alienated from nature, and this remarkable book, which could easily be subtitled ‘Travels With a Man and His Dog,’ will help us all to ‘rewild’ our hearts and reconnect with our incredibly interesting and breathtaking world. I love this book and find myself constantly going back to the superlative pictures and taking off on my own imagined journeys.”
—Marc Bekoff, co-founder (with Jane Goodall) of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, author of Nature’s Life Lessons (with Jim Carrier), The Emotional Lives of Animals, and Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (with Jessica Pierce), and editor of Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation
Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash is a 136-page compendium showcasing the black-and-white photography of Chuck Forsman. Enhanced with an informative introduction by Eric Paddock, Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash presents visual imagery focused on what a dog sees, smells, and is drawn by canine curiosity to investigate. The premise of the project was quite simple, take a camera along when Chuck Forsman walked his dog in the neighborhood and surrounding hills near where they live, along with adventures in other parts of the country ranging from Alaska and the Northwest Territories of Canada, to Florida, Ohio, and New York City. The result is a compilation of truly impressive and occasionally meditative images. Walking Magpie: On and Off the Leash is a highly recommended photographic study.
—James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Midwest Book Review
From the Introduction: “For more than forty years, Chuck Forsman has been a pioneering landscape artist whose paintings and photographs have engaged us and helped us to focus on environmental and land-use issues. Here, in Walking Magpie, Forsman shows us a layered continental landscape that is banal and beautiful, gentle and terrifying by turns. His eye for form, detail, and the occasional quiet joke―combined with Magpie’s canine exploration and acceptance of the world as he finds it―challenge ordinary perceptions of ‘landscape’ and of ‘community’ and awaken in us a new sense of where and how we live.”
—Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography, Denver Art Museum
My Place
There is nothing unique about a unique Western town, so I will simply refer to Boulder as peculiar. It’s a college town and doesn’t seem like a Western town. A tax-supported greenbelt with miles of hiking trails and protected parkland surround it, in effect tying it to its stunning surroundings while isolating it from the surrounding culture. The view to the west is blocked by the rugged foothills, which rise majestically to the Continental Divide; but, looking east, one is greeted by the unbroken sweep of the Great Plains. Boulder is, however, tied to currents well beyond its greenbelt. It is a haven for Nobel scientists, Olympic athletes, start-ups, and Buddhists. Many Coloradans are ambivalent or hostile to Boulder because of its liberal politics and exclusivity. I grew up in a working-class Western culture, so I remain stubbornly tied to the larger culture.
Colorado can be loosely divided into three cultural/geographical areas commonly referred to as the Eastern Plains, a vast region of rolling dry grasslands with a sparse, agriculture-based population; the Front Range, where most of the state’s population is concentrated along the I-25 north/south corridor hugging the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains that includes the population centers of Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo; and, lastly, the Western Slope, which includes the rugged mountain, mesa, and canyon regions that break off from the Great Divide into the surrounding states and desert regions and includes Vail, Aspen, Grand Junction, Durango, and other scattered communities based on ranching, mining, tourism, and more. The central metropolitan area is often loosely referred to as the Denver/Boulder area. Boulder, however, is often regarded as an effete satellite, a fate shared by university towns elsewhere.
Boulder basks in an athletic, sun-drenched, outdoor culture, awash in dogs, bicycles, and German cars—and some bikes may be worth more than the cars. Its prosperity and location predispose the population now to homogeneity, being primarily white, educated, affluent, and they, like me, imported. A shadow population of Latino workers live here, and manage to find residence despite the expensive housing.
My wife, Kris Lewis, is an architect. We have lived in Boulder since I came to teach painting at the University of Colorado in 1971. Our dissimilar twin daughters, Chloe and Shannon, were born in 1987. Wary of a privileged learning environment, we enrolled them in a bilingual primary school, where they made rich friendships and became fully steeped in Latino culture. The “shadow community” emerged from the shadows for all of us. We found that looking deeper inside one’s community can be as enriching as looking beyond it.
Today, Shannon is an accomplished rock climber and teacher, and Chloe is a top-professional mountain bike racer. Kris and I bike and hike the local trails. All of us both resist and indulge in what our home place has made of us.
Copyright © 2013 Charles Forsman. All rights reserved.
© Photographs of Magpie in and around Boulder by Charles Forsman