Fifty places, and what they cost. Los Angeles has water because it bought a valley three hundred miles away and took the river. The aqueduct opened in 1913, and the man who built it said five words to the crowd: there it is, take it. The valley it came from is one of the emptiest and most beautiful landscapes in the state, and that is a direct result of what was done to it. Fifty places, fifty versions of that story. Not what somewhere looks like, which the painting already tells you, but how it came to look like that. A town in the Sacramento Delta built by Chinese immigrants who were barred by law from owning the ground under it, and whose descendants finally bought it in 2004. A camp in the Owens Valley where ten thousand American citizens were held, and where they built gardens and schools and baseball leagues behind the wire. A gold town at eight thousand feet, empty since the 1940s, held by the state in what it calls arrested decay. Two orange trees from Brazil that every Washington navel in California is descended from, one of them still alive on a street corner. And a sawmill on a river where a carpenter found a few flakes of metal nine days before Mexico signed California over to the United States. Six sections run in order rather than by region, because California's story is not spatial. Four events remade the whole state inside a generation each: the missions, gold, water and the war. Everything here is downstream of one of them. Inside: Fifty full-page original paintings, in color Six essays running from 1769 to the present Histories researched from the record, not from the legend Disagreements between sources left standing rather than smoothed over A word on what this is. These are not scans of old postcards. Every image is original artwork, painted for this book, and several are of places nobody photographs: an oil field, a levee town, a sentry post on a sagebrush plain. It is also not a guidebook. There are no opening hours here. Painted Postcards is a series about places and how they came to look the way they do. Las Vegas is the first volume, Italy the second, California the third.
