Notes on a Shared Landscape: Making Sense of the American West

In his best-selling Art and Fear, David Bayles (with Ted Orland) closely examined personal and autobiographical episodes in search of general truths about artmaking. Bayles now turns that same attention to his native West.

When European Americans “discovered” the American West, they fell in love with the resplendent landscape. The love affair and its congenital flaws persists to this day.

Bayles writes: “. . . the question is why my people bungled our occupation of the West so badly when no o...