Ladd Mountain

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

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

Looking southeast from the Bullfrog Hills

Near Beatty, Nevada – Jer

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.

Highway 50 east of Austin, Nevada

– Jer

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).

Desert plants near Phoenix

– Jer