After-words, September, 2009

It seems essential to rethink the Beatty experience. First, because I’m hoping to return and continue this Journal in November 2009 (god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, and knock on wood with some salt thrown over my shoulder ).

I’m going back to do what I had hoped at one point in my earlier stay I might try — to paint a surround that captured something of the interaction of desert and my psyche — part landscape, part plein air (working with the Barn doors open to the Amargosa Plain), part imagination, from some skewed viewpoints that highlight better what it is that I want to capture. I’m hoping to go up and do studies from the Bare Mountains and then include them in larger paintings. I want to go back to the Beatty Cut-off (Rt 374) for more studies, more inclusions.

My plans, always tentative and subject to change, are to paint large panels, panels that keep the viewer from being able to encompass everything from a short distance, forcing her to walk lengths and look up high and down low. These will have to be big canvas panels, and big canvases of the area that William L Fox calls “the void.”

I am indebted to Mary Hill for getting me to read Fox, whose book, The Void, the Grid, and the Sign as well as Aereality have informed my thinking about the Amargosa plain and its neighbors.

Coming back to Portland was difficult. My painting couldn’t jog itself back to gentle, domesticated landscapes until high summer and a week-long plein air set of paintings finally got me into the trees of a wooded park and a mind-set for green and gold. But later, in August, I got to go off to the High Desert of southeast Oregon, near Steens Mountain, and there I started trying to regain control for the desert void.

I didn’t manage it, although the paintings aren’t bad (see southeastmain, 4 posts in a row, to check out what happened in the desert just north of the great basin and range country of Nevada.) I needed to learn not to crowd my canvases. Crowding in the city makes sense; crowding in the desert is non-sense. I played with time, although not with space, in the eastern Oregon work.

In the studio, I played with space, not very successfully, trying to get one canvas, Amargosa Playa 2, that I brought back with me to work. Even in its last (but perhaps not final) carnation, I don’t think it’s successful. But I got a number of ideas from working it that I think may send me flying out over the Amargosa Plain, developing paintings from there.

So I bonded with the desert and with Beatty. I’m going back to see what more can be extracted from me. I need to depict my sense of how the space reverberates when I stand with it. I can’t capture it all, but I can try. I can try.

Here’s the first version of the Amargosa Playa 2, the one I carted back to Portland with me in April, 2009

And here’s the version of the painting as it stand on September 1, 2009

Amargosa Playa 2, 48 x 50″, Oil on canvas, 2009

So I have miles to go before I sleep, and must ignore the woods, no matter how green and deep.