On the spur road to Rhyolite — Jer

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

Ladd Mountain. View is to the east from the Red Barn — Jer

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

Near Beatty, Nevada – Jer

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.

– Jer

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).

At Austin, we turned east on 50 (“the loneliest highway in the US”) for a bit and after crossing Bob Scotts Summit, we left 50 and turned down a Rt 50 tributary, south again, on 376, down the Big Smoky Valley.

The Big Smoky Valley runs between the Toiyabe and Toquima Ranges, and is pleasant enough, although the Kinross Round Mountain Gold Corporation (affiliated with Barrick Gold Corporation) toward Hadley and Carvers, at the southern end of the valley is mostly piles, huge piles, of mine tailings. The mountain was mostly no  longer  such; just big pyramidal piles of smashed, cyanide-leached rock. Which was an appropriate introduction to Tonopah, just 90 miles from Beatty. It was late and we decided to stay in Tonopah, a town we hadn’t seen on our last trip.

Our hotel window looked out on what may have been miners shacks but more probably were prostitutes’ cribs:

The internet connection didn’t work, the motel was under some kind of construction, and the town was built on tailings. Not a single large tailing heap, but rather batches of them, serving as underpinnings to shacks, shanties, trailers, wooden houses, and even a sort-of castle. The Courthouse (Nye County) seemed to have been built on rock, but just over the edge of the court house hill, I photographed a mine hole opening  that ran back under the rock upon which the courthouse sat.

If Ma Earth shakes her head near Tonopah, the town will disappear under heaps of crushed rock. We actually toured the town and took photographs and even went into their museum, which was quite good for a small town, but I felt an enormous relief when we picked up Rt 6 for a little and then dropped south (again) down the utterly boring route 95, through Goldfield (which is a bit derelict, but charming anyway), past Lida Junction to Goldpoint, where we froze last March, past the Sarcobatus Flats, whose name is apt, and into the Amargosa swale, where the aspen are just turning gold, the Bare Mountains gleam silvery-blue in the distance, and Beatty Mountain shelters the town, still.

It’s “Beatty Days” this weekend (the town is 105 years old), bikers are swarming the saloon, the town park  is filled with tents of goodies, a parade came through Saturday morning and there’s a pancake breakfast on Sunday –  we felt welcomed home. We drove out to the Red Barn, first thing, just to assure me that it was all as it should be. Aside for the addition of a satellite dish for internet and a new screen door, all was serene.

It felt like home. –June

– Jer

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:

We both had learned to drive in the Pennsylvania snow and had  lived in Wyoming for some years, but living in Portland for close to twenty years has a) made our traction devices unnecessary (the  old chains don’t work on the Honda and b) made us older, wiser, and much more cautious. However, the snow looked to be lightening,the forecast not so bad and we traveled on southeast, along the edge of the Alvord desert and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, down into the basin and range country of northern Nevada. It was slightly disorienting, although the highway was always oriented, even with tads of ground blizzards. We could only sort of make out the desert ranges that skirted each side of  the highway. The fog/clouds/snow storms through which we traveled made the travel unreal and a bit magical. It was particularly magical because no real disaster or even anxiety occurred. The Honda hugged the roads, which were generally not slippery. And the bit of snow cover added some frisson to our travels.

No real danger ensued. Once we dropped out of the last pass down into Winnemucca the skies started to clear and we could feel the weight of the wet atmospher lift. But there were moments, when only the road gave us orientation.

If you are curious, we were in the quarter of Oregon which is, like the snow,  mostly white — few roads,no towns, no hamlets, few crossroads, no gas stations, no national forests, no highway patrol or warning about ice signs — just blanks with highway lines overlaid– but not absent — space.  It’s the southeastern corner of the state — not even a Herein Lie Dragons warning:

At the end of the day, Winnemucca appeared along the Humboldt River, our motel was as expected, and we went off to an unexpected pleasure at a Basque Restaurant at the Winnemucca Hotel, a funky old bar and family-style eatery along the river in what must be old town Winnemucca.

The dinner was worth the ride, the snow, the slight anxiety, and the shock of entering an empty bar (great back bar of mahogany) with no one there but the grouchy bartender, who announced that we couldn’t have dinner for 15 minutes ( at 6:15 PM). I ordered a Bud out of solidarity with the proletariat, found wine on the table, and a marvelous meal culminating in the best steak I have ever eaten. I’m only sorry they don’t serve breakfast, although I’m not sure I could deal with a Bud at breakfast.

It’s the Winnemucca Hotel on Bridge Street a bit off the strip of Winnemucca I-80, and definitely worth it, even to the point of drinking Bud beer. Some things, alas, don’t change. But some do, and having friends who can find a treasure like this is one of them. Thanks Joan and Skip. --June

Oh, and I wasn’t even tempted to paint during this trip. I’m still trying to see the desert without imposing my Green Willamette Valleyeyes.