It was a busy day and started with various “challenges” including a notice from Amazon that they would immediately send out my new laptop (ordered last night) to Portland and bill me in Beatty. Not!!!! I found a contact number, emailed them, and then got them to call me — before I had drunk even a single cup of coffee. Priorities, priorities.
On our way to the Red Barn Studio, we stopped at the Lost River Groc and misc store, where George, who is becoming its proprietor, said he wanted to come up to the Barn to check out my paintings — today. And today the folks from the Nevada Arts Council were coming to pick up the exhibit that just came down. So I stuck around the studio and putzed, trying to add words to paintings without having a proper brush and brushing out places I had put finger marks on the paintings. I chatted up a couple of tourists from north of Spokane, helped the Arts Council women load up the art, showed George what I was doing and got some painting and touring advice from him, and spent time with Betty and Fred, who dropped by on their way home from honchoing the Rhyolite BLM site; they are the official caretakers there at the moment. Betty had some funny stories about a sculpture that looked like a penis and a daughter who called to ask if her mother would be upset if she (the daughter) got a job in a whorehouse. As a cook. But before Betty revealed that bit of info, she told me that she asked her daughter if she thought her back was strong enough to take the work involved. Raconteurs of Beatty.
So it was 2 or so before I actually got to painting. Earlier I futzed around with my first downtown Beatty painting. It’s better for the futzing , but still isn’t good. But in order to be honest with myself….
Beatty Exchange Club and Lou’s Hardware, 12 x 16″ oil on board (painted over before the end of March)
This is the building at the corner of Main and Main — or the equivalent thereof. It still needs its identifying texts — which show it as a saloon and gambling den, turned hardware store. I will have to try again to see if I can get a better angle.
I worked on the Exchange Club this AM while waiting for people to show up, but after everyone left, I hauled my stuff out beside the Barn and painted Bonanza Mountain — just the east half of it — which sits behind the old Bullfrog Jail, which is not far from the Barn and is part of the Goldwell property. The Jail apparently is inhabited by many rattlesnakes, which has nothing to do with today’s activities at all. Except that while I was painting it, I was thinking of all the crevices in the stones:
Bonanza Mountain East, from Bullfrog (the Red Barn), oil on board, 12 x 16″.
It’s not a great painting, but it is a good start. While I was painting in the westering sun, I found that everything except the reds that I was using looked blue if they had any white in them. I kept thinking that I was using a “contaminated” brush and then that I had somehow gotten blue (or perylene green which can go toward blue when white is added) in my palette piles. I finally decided it was a trick of the light and simply painted what I hoped would be close to what I was looking for. And when I went inside, this is what the painting looked like. Either I’m going color blind or the world is playing me tricks.
A raven did fly directly overhead, so perhaps it was the old trickster, trying to make me give up the sun. No way!!!!
All the comments about sun and shadow and color that I ever heard of the desert regions is true here. The hills change from minute to minute, one moment being clarified as if they’d been dipped in a solution that was made to bring out all their edges — and the next minute, they appear misty and blue, scarcely defined. The golds, in the setting sun, are spectacular. The camera can’t catch them (but the artist can photoshop the images a bit):
This isn’t as golden as I saw it, but nothing photoshop can do matches old Ma Nature. The structure sits just across the road from the Red Barn; Betty told me it was the Bullfrog ice house, one of two or three ruins from the town of Bullfrog.
Tomorrow, I want to paint Bonanza Mountain West: It has some fun organic shapes. I took this photo about 5 PM, so I can compare it to what it looks like at 10 AM and decide when painting it would be best.
The evening sun (or the photo) doesn’t show the lumpish rounded shapes as well as I could see them. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
Reported from the Goldwell House, Beatty, Nevada.
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