I took the day off. Completely off. Didn’t go to the Red Barn. Didn’t approach Rhyolite. Didn’t go up the Beatty Cut-off. Nope. Stayed home. Went for a Tuesday Drive with Jer. Took a nap. Drank a bit of wine. Got rested.
I got up feeling tired and was then seriously put out to discover that the Liquin Medium I ordered on Friday was being sent by ground from Wisconsin and wouldn’t arrive until November 18 — 8 days from today. I ordered it because by Friday I could see that the Liquin I had brought with me was running very low and might not make it. I was right. Yesterday Monday) I had reduced the remaining medium (a substitute for linseed oil) to two tablespoons, with two panels left. This morning I awoke to the Fed Ex tracking number that told me the delivery date was to be November 18.
Las Vegas has a Dick Blick store, but that is a couple hundred miles round trip and I’d have to drag Jer away from his computing, something he wasn’t eager to have happen. So I groused, put on my shoes, walked down to the Amargosa “river” (which had water running in it, a trickle I could have stepped over), listened to the grackles, looked at the golden cottonwood trees, and saw what I think was a dove or two. I stood in the sun and let it warm my back, and came back inside, where I ordered again, two day shipping, with the surcharge for hazardous fast shipping. I did not mortgage my last grandchild but I certainly groaned a lot over the surcharge. But then I caught up on my email, finished an obscure Trollope novel that I’ve been reading for three weeks, took a nap and when I got up, all seemed right again.
Late in the afternoon, we drove to Pioneer, a “ghost town” north of Beatty. Pioneer dates from 1909, picking up population as the mines at Rhyolite were playing out. Unlike Rhyolite, many of the buildings in Pioneer were made of corrugated iron, rather than tents and stone, and it apparently reached its peak in March and April 1909. The town managed to struggle on, greatly reduced in size and activity, for a few years after 1909 but now, all that’s left are heaps of tailings, pits with wire and warnings strung about them, and a nice view if you struggle through the dust to the top of the biggest tailing. A boom town indeed.
Oh yes, I forgot, there’s a head frame and an apparently modern ore hopper. And vehicle tracks, tracks through the piles, over the piles, up the piles and down the other side.
This is a photo of the biggest remains at the ghost town of Pioneer. Probably a head frame, but perhaps a stamping mill. We couldn’t get close enough to know for sure.
–One of hundreds of desert tracks in the Pioneer area.
The ore hopper, which apparently was feeding the tailings on which we stood. They were so high I didn’t realize we were not just climbing up a natural hill until I go to the top and saw the flattened and shattered scree on which we stood.
The scene from the tailings pile at Pioneer. This looks down on a pass that leads to the Sarc0batus flats –the hills beyond are part of the Nevada (Military) Test Site, off-limits to civilians.
We thought about taking the road on west and north around the hill (part of the north Bullfrog Hills), getting back to route 95 at Springdale (an even shorter-lived desert town with no trace left except a sign) but the “road” quickly deteriorated into a track, which the Honda, low-slung as it is, did not like traveling. And Jer didn’t like driving. And I was without a coat and my snake stomping boots. So being cautious as well as hungry, we turned around and drove back the way we came, waving to the wild burros on the hillside as we went by.
A day off with a Tuesday drive in the wilds isn’t a bad thing once in a while. Tomorrow, I’ll return to the Barn to work on the Board panels, which don’t call for much medium. That will give me more studies to play with while I await Fed Ex and the Liquin. I’m thinking of buying one of Richard’s flutes to entertain me when the painting isn’t going well. Somehow the sound seems like it might aid the magic.
From Beatty, Nevada, where I can still taste the dust of Pioneer.
Issue du Jour — Skies: Day 9, November 9. 2009
November 9, 2009 by june
[I discovered I had published this in our general blog, southeastmain, by mistake. Not surprising, since I’m generally exhausted by the time I get to the blog in the evening. So here it is in whatever for WordPress decides to copy it in. I’m doing this for the record, not for the joy… june]
I’m exhausted. Stayed up until 9:30 last night — altogether too late. And yesterday I worked too hard for today to be a breeze. There was not much of a breeze, thank heavens, because when there is, the barn is either frigid or a delightfully cool. Today, it would have been frigid.
So after I reworked a couple of the board panels (which I forgot to photograph), I slowly attacked the question of the the skies on the linen panels. I have a notion of what I want — cool temperature colors for the sky on the left (putative east), going neutral and flat in the middle, and then warming up on the west. So ultramarine and cobalt violet on the left, and cerulean/cobalt and whatever on the right. But I was having real trouble blending them.
The problem, I discovered, is that the cerulean/cobalt mix is both more opaque and warmer and hence on the beige linen shows up differently than does the ultramarine. It took me most of the day to smooth out the differences for the first four panels. Then I started in on panel 5 and of course, the problems were the same.
Here are panels 3, 4, and 5 toward the end of the day, where the fifth one shows some of the problems to be dealt with tomorrow:
I didn’t put much cerulean on panel 5 today, although I perhaps should have. But I decided that it was better to put up some kind of undercoat and then go with the cerulean, which in the oils that I’m working with, is a kind of bully color. It’s far brighter than the ultramarine, so I need to deal with it gently. The middle panel above has its cerulean toned down, even though it’s the central panel and I thought yesterday I had divided it between cool and warm fairly well. But this morning, it was clear that that panel needed cooling.
To see further the differences, here is panel 1, 2, and 3.
The cobalt violet is the cool but pinkish interjection into the basic ultramarine. The middle panel has a lot of cerulean, toned, at the very base, where the sky and earth come together and pull the eye.
Here’s a view of the five panels as they existed about 3 PM today.
The post runs down one of the verticals of tape, so although it’s distracting, it doesn’t really block the view.
It was about 3:15 PM, after I took the photo above, when I sat down in front of the big doors, exhausted, wishing Jer would show up. But as I sat there, I was looking at the Bare Mountains, that run down the east (left) panel. And clearly, in the late afternoon, they put on their own show, soaking up the western sun. I couldn’t stand it — I got back up and mixed up a pinkish-gray, and some other stuff, and with a palette knife worked that into Panel # 1. I had known it would need reworking but didn’t expect to get to it so soon.
Now it feels like I’m finally painting something besides a great big fussy wall of fabric. The Bare Mountains have huge slate sides and are flat and jagged in their shapes. I’ve painted them before with great pleasure and can see the panel is now to the point where the pleasure will start up again. I got to use my funny clay shaping tool ( it looks a bit like a putty knife), which I used on a Death Valley painting that I still like a lot. So I’ve now got enough paint on the canvas that I can ‘begin painting.”
Reported, exhausted, from the Goldwell House, where Jer may have solved the heating problem — with a little help from our friends in Vegas, who responded promptly to his cry for assistance. Me, I open the barn doors and let the sun heat up the barn while I drink my hot tea.
Tags: Amargosa Desert, Drafts, oil painting, Skies
Posted in Amargosa Desert, Red Barn Studio, Red Barn at Rhyolite, landscape, painting | Edit | 2 Comments
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