Diary of a Residency: Feb 18, 2009, Day 3

Day 3, February 18, 2009

After a visit to the Lou’s Hardware store for masking tape and a gesso brush, we went off to the Red Barn Studio. It was a bit warmer this morning, and the sun was shining fully. I also had my long underwear on.

I have decided on a morning ritual —  first, a bit of a walk in the desert, looking at whatever catches me. (Today it was sinkholes — or maybe they were bummed out house foundations or caved in mine holes). The Red Barn area was a briefly inhabited, then thoroughly deserted, townsite called Bullfrog, so there’s a lot of human detritus alongside desert plants and rocks. The rocks are glorious.

Part of the ritual is to find the day’s rock and place it outside a rock circle that already has been planted in the Barn’s “yard.”

These are today’s and yesterday’s rocks; and the photo below is of the circle. Modest, but it makes a morning ritual that gets me around the territory.

I also picked up a piece of weathered particle board of some sort — quite beautiful. It deserves to be an art piece, so I’m mulling over its use. [ed. note: the board seemed to become, as the days grew warmer, the perfect hiding place for snakes. Also it kept being blown askew in the wind. It finally lost its charm and was allowed to return to its natural desert habitat.]

The inside of the Barn was cold, but outside in the sun it was tolerable, so I turned on my radio to be heard outside, left the door open, and painted the scene to the south. The sun was warm on my back.

Here’s the painting all gussied up in Photoshop.

South from the Red Barn, oil on board, 12 x 16, 2009, Feb 18

I was happy with this painting, which went rather quickly. My new desert hat allowed me to paint without sun glasses, which was a blessing. And the oils get tacky fast in the desert. I had forgotten this but it’s also a blessing — painting on board can be sloppy until the oils dry a bit.

Then I tackled the “Back Wall” — my mulling and circling project. I got the canvas cut and taped to the wall, with cross hairs to keep me centered. I have some notion of doing windows, with the landscape escaping from them, as I did in yesterday’s sketch. I also want, perhaps, to include other artifacts. Here’s the set-up:

[ed note: this is one of the discarded canvases. Some notions aren’t much worth noting.]

And in case anyone thinks that I might run out of landscapes to contemplate, here’s a view of the Red Barn from Rhyolite, the ghost town to the northeast:

Jer and I wandered around Rhyolite after he picked me up this afternoon. It has even more evidence of human litter and middens, as well as fairly impressive ruins. I think I need to see and come to know more of the place before I can really begin the back wall. Or maybe I just need to do a bunch of back walls.

Reported from Beatty, Nevada, at the Goldwell Open Air Museum’s Workspace Residency.

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