Rackstraw Downes paints down-to-earth, often gritty features of today's American environment in an unflinching and highly realistic style. This book is the first to provide a multifaceted picture of his work, its intellectual foundations, and its place in the history of art - from both outside commentators and Downes himself. Beautifully illustrated, with copious examples from thirty years of the artist's work, this book makes eminently clear why Downes is widely regarded as a 'painter's painter'. It showcases many of the artist's panoramic pictures - painted with a strong sense of place and a miniaturist's sense of scale. The images, which depict industrial parks, construction sites, housing projects, refineries, razor wire, and landfills, stimulate fresh thoughts about these supposedly unattractive sights.Bathed in the light of a precise time, the paintings resonate with a strikingly evocative quality. The three essays that accompany Downes's art provide rare insights into the way a painter thinks and works. Sanford Schwartz explores the relationships between the artist's personal and intellectual background and his oeuvre. Robert Storr situates Downes in the context of a number of highly prominent contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Robert Smithson in a way that offers a new interpretation of Downes's work, while making clear its importance within twentieth-century art. Downes's own essay, 'Turning the Head in Empirical Space', presents a direct, first-hand account of his working methods within a larger discussion on spatial paradigms of Renaissance and post-Renaissance modes of painting.