Friends and jury-riggings

Beatty is full of people who like to look after The Artist. The McCoys, caretakers of the Open Air Museum up the road a piece, drop in to make sure I haven’t fallen off the step ladder or been bitten by a tarantula. (No, Del, I won’t show another one of the critters, although I think they are  cute).

John Donahoe, who bought one of my paintings last year and who has a fine greyhound who respects the Studio and its artist, lent me the precise step stool I need to reach the top of the big canvases. I can actually reach the top standing on the floor, but it’s uncomfortable. With John’s stepstool, I can stand on the first step, hang onto the back of the stool with my left hand and paint with my right. Not a lot of danger there:

Then Richard Stephens showed up with a box of oil paints for me and two flutes that he made. They use a pentatonic scale, that sound that sends shivers up your spine. I made him play both in the barn and out, because I wanted to hear how the sound changed.

And I got a photo of the Red Barn from behind, looking out at the scenery from just up the hill to the north. I can never get enough photos of this scenery (although Jer seems to be stealing the show with his new equipment and better eye):

I have two small masonite board studies of Panels # 2 and #7, and I have started painting canvas panels #1 and #2. None are done well enough to be seen too publicly yet; i’m learning about clear gessoed linen and figure by the time I’ve finished the seven monsters, I might know something about how to paint it. I threw out the small-scale linen back wall panel; it was too muddy to save. I copied down where the big forms would be placed so I still have the scheme for the large pieces. Now all I have to do is paint them. Maybe next time I post I’ll have a painting worth showing. Or maybe not…… –June

Canvases Cut, Studio less empty

The Red Barn studio is filling up:

The Easel in the photo is a big one — about 8 feet at its highest. So you can tell the size of the panels. Actually there are seven of them on the wall at this point (the photo of the seven that I took is really dreadful), so the whole will be 5 feet by 28 feet (each panel being 5 feet high and 4 feet wide.

I’m starting to sketch on news print and put up trial bits of canvas here and there to practice on. I’ve painted an acrylic sketch (to be seen only from a great distance), a canvas sample that misplaces the very first panel I want to paint and goes downhill from there, and, finally, a 12 x 16 masonite board, which I couldn’t see because I was observing the brilliantly lit desert from inside the relatively reasonably lit studio:

Another migrating visitor appeared on Tuesday, this time halfway across the Studio floor. I think the Red Barn is directly in its migratory path.

It got terrified and hid (but not well) in a crevice beside the door for about 3 hours. When I went to close the door, I had to use the end of a stretcher bar to whoosh it on its way. Apparently the smell of Portland moisture was enough to disgust it and out the door it went, looking a bit bewildered (un-oriented) but outside, at least for now.

So the brushes are out and about, the spiral from the first residency continues to garner a rock a day, and on Wednesday, I put up my obo. Actually I started it earlier, but with only one rock, it looked lonesome. Now it’s much more assertive.

–June

Beatty, Nevada and thereabouts

We are settling in. I have begun work at the Red Barn, the studio provided by the Goldwell Open Air Museum Foundation. Jer has set up his computer at his end of the dining room table in Beatty, where we are in the Goldwell House for the next five weeks or so. We saw almost everyone in town that we knew and they all seemed genuinely happy to have us back.

It was Beatty Days when we arrived and so on Sunday we went off to the Lions Club Pancake Breakfast:

Later, we saw David Lancaster and got the House keys and unpacked. Then we drove out to the Red Barn, where we were greeted by this critter:

I was glad to make his/her acquaintance, but didn’t really want to share the studio space with her, so I screeched the screen door, and she reversed course and scuttled into the sagebrush.

Before we left the Red Barn area, however, we had to pay our regards to Panamint Annie, whose grave is both well kept and strewn with pennies. I left a quarter, hoping to gain her ghostly approval. It would have been better to pour some beer on her stone, but alas, we had none with us.

And so now I get to face the work itself — the empty studio (not to mention the blank canvases) awaits me.

–June

By the way, I am keeping a residency journal of the work I do in the empty space — hopefully it will be filled by the time we leave. If you are interested in checking in on the process, here’s the link.

On the Road: Winnemucca to Beatty

Winnemucca turned out to be a not bad place, even though it’s an Interstate (80) Stop. The motel internet worked well, the sky was full of fluffy, unthreatening clouds and the surrounding hills looked interesting. Given that Nevada sometimes is trashed byentities outside the state, I was warmed by this sign in a bicycle shop window, across from the Courthouse:

After photographing  Winnemucca’s Courthouse, we drove a few miles east on Interstate 80, to  Battle Mountain, the county seat of Lander County. I-80 winds through the Sonoma Summit along the way, which is pleasantly mountainous, with some curious fits of trees among the barren hills. Summits are interesting if it isn’t snowing, and this day started at about 50 degrees F. and got warmer as the day progressed.

At Battle Mountain, we left the big road and dropped south on NV 305 along the the Reese River, which gave some definition to the big basin we traveled south through. This is classic Basin and Range country; the ranges go northeast/southwest, with broad valleys between, and mostly we traveled southwest, between the ranges, down the basins. At the end of that valley we climbed up through the Shoshone Range and came to Austin (Nevada), a little mountain town, originally a mining site, but most of that unseen amidst the lumpy landscape. What charmed me was the clear competition between the churches, whose spires dominated the town, but whose congregations have mostly moved on. The former county courthouse is intact and on the National Register (Battle Mountain became the county seat in 1997).

On the Road, from Portland Oregon to Beatty, Nevada

We are traveling back to Beatty, Nevada, for six weeks. I have a residency as Workspace artist at the Goldwell Open Air Art Museum; Jer has comfy quarters in the Goldwell House in the town of Beatty.

Travel, in October, we assumed would be relatively easy — rain, maybe, but too early for snow. The Honda  was filled to the brim, of course, since Beatty, population 1, 154, has no art supply store.

Beatty has one grocery, two gas stations (if you include the Casino), 4 motels, and the Goldwell House. Four miles outside of Beatty is the Red Barn, where the Goldwell Foundation has studios for artists, at the head of the Amargosa Desert. That’s were we were headed, 220 miles south of Reno, 110 miles north of Las Vegas, and straight south of eastern-most Oregon.

The trip started out with rain (of course). The Cascades had snow dumped on them, so we opted for traveling east on the Columbia Gorge Highway (Interstate 80) which had both phenomenal cloud formations and marvelous green and gold forest to feed the eye.

We dropped south to Prineville at Biggs Junction and spent the night. Then we moseyed on down to Burns/Hines, where I fought with my computer and Jer did Wikipedia work. We slept well, and when I awoke with some good cheer the next morning (Thursday), Jer said, “we have a situation.” In my sleep befogged brain I was clueless about “situations,” general or specific, until he opened the curtains:

Jockeying in the Queue: the Oil Painting

At the beginning of October, Sheila sent me her challenge piece. She works in textiles, and the challenge is for me to respond to her textile piece with a painted piece.

Here’s Sheila’s quilted art:

Sheila Barnes, Jockeying in the Queue, 16 x 12″, plus frame. Hand-dyed cotton, machine stitched, 2009

October was not my best painting month. Some things got done, with some difficulty, and others got put off. But my version of Jockeying should have been started about five weeks before it actually got started, which was about 2 weeks ago.

The backstory of the painting goes like this: I love the notion of good activities jostling other good activities (an embarrassment of riches, as it were), and my life is filled with such. So I decided to set up a still life with “things” that represent the jockeying of the choice elements in my quotidian, examples of what I want to be engaged with, simultaneously, and equally well, all the time I’m awake.

While I couldn’t include everything that jostles me (no music  here, for example) and while I needed something of a “queue” — I.E. a line — I still included some major loves.  I chose a serious non-fiction book (Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama) and a book of poems (What Do We Know by Mary Oliver), some brushes and a palette, a glass of wine, my favorite cup with tea in it, a piece of charcoal, a spool of thread and scissors, and what started out to be blank, watercolor-paintable postcards, but ended up as a small notebook. (I decided against the big brush on the palette).

All these items were lined up, sort of, on a rolling table that hangs around the studio. Behind the table I draped some fabric, not to paint  but to block out the distracting junk on the table behind the table. (I could ignore the distracting junk on the floor beside the set-up.) Then I put up a strong directed light source to clue me in on shadows and depth, and started the painting.

The other part of the idea of jockeying, besides showing the elements of painting, sewing, reading, writing and drinking that fill my life, was that in my head I had long wanted to do another classic still life. I have only done two still lifes prior to this one, and only one of those was “classic.” In a PCC class I took, the instructor, Ms Guttman, taught us about laying on thin layers of oil paint, allowing each layer to dry before the next layer was laid on;  “classic,”  she said, called for at least seven layers. This method of laying on layers of paint achieves the feeling of depth that some of the old masters achieve. My desire to paint this way has been jockeying in my queue of desired painting modes for some time, so I decided a still life, done in the classical manner, with examples of the fun elements of my existence pushing against one another, would be my answer to Sheila’s elegant triangles. And oh yes, I always wanted to do a dark background,  a la Rembrandt, against which the still life would shine; that became the last element in the queue to be settled upon.

Underwood, Jockeying in the Queue, 16 x 12″ Oil on masonite, 2009

Ya win some; ya lose some. I didn’t start early enough, so my seven-plus layers of paint had to be put on before the prior layer(s) were thoroughly dry. Hence they sometimes smeared  rather than glazing. Not always, just sometimes. And I certainly didn’t start early enough to put on lettering, for which the painting has to be entirely dry. (Odds are, the painting is not, even yet, dry.)

I finished up at the last possible moment, stuck on the lettering as best I could dab it, and later cleaned up the worst of the smears  in (gasp) Photoshop and Paint. At this very moment I am seeing more of what has to be done to the painting. Which doing will have to wait until December or January.

But anyway, the idea feels appropriate, and I managed to use blue for the tabletop, echoing Sheila’s blue background, and I honorably fulfilled my pledge. I also managed to work in layers (they were drying OK until the heat got turned off for the construction project), made a nice dark background on one side and lovely browns on the other (although more layers would have been even better). So I sent off the image to Sheila and turned off the light, emptied the by-now molding cup of tea, threw out the vinegar that substituted for wine (I was reluctant to waste good wine on a still life that was unlikely to be a masterpiece,) and set everything else to rights.

Next year is coming, and I might even try another classic still life sometime in the future. My desire to do one has been properly sent to the back of the queue. --June

Although another desire has pushed its way toward the front of the queue. I want to learn more about setting up still life materials, well-designed, yet specific to my own vision. We’ll see whether that pushy thought gets to the front of the line.

Cool Paintings

Remember the “hot” paintings Jan and I did. Well, we continued the experience, doing “cool” paintings this time.

I will confess that I was a bit horrified to see that Lucia (Salemme, whose 1972 Color Exercises for the Painter we are vaguely following) distinguishes between hot, cool, warm and cold. I did not really realize this until after we were well into the “cool” exercise; my mind still has to translate from “toad” (toward yellow) and toad blue.

Given my gross understandings, our choices of subjects may be a bit colder than we will be happy with later. Lucia (as we refer to her since we’ve grown rather fond of her and her manner of expression) suggested an undersea scene with blues and greens and fish, seaweed, or vegetation to make details. Both Jan and I rejected a sea scene out of hand. And went with photos we had on hand, which turned out to be rather, well, cold.

This was my absolutely first draft, done more than a week ago. That’s my excuse. It’s about 14 x18″, oil on some kind of board. Maybe I turn this into an underwater scene.

I never had a chance to get back to mine, but Jan came by and while I was fussing at the computer, spent a couple of hours finishing hers. She used, I think, only three colors, one of which wasn’t on Lucia’s list but which worked brilliantly. As I said, we are becoming very friendly with Lucia, and her instructions are often casual to the point of non-existent. So we allow ourselves necessary leeway.

Jan Underwood,  A Winter Scene, about 14 x 18,  oil on some kind of board.

I think it’s a pretty nifty painting, myself. And not an easy subject, with difficulties of composition as well as color. And so it goes. My painting will sit until I return and then we’ll see if it swims with the fishies. Probably it depends on what Lucia calls “cold.” –June