This is a double posting, ruminations from Day 29 of my Residency at the Goldwell Open Air Art Museum. So if you’re reading the residency journal, this is all old news. And it’s really an essay ruminating about the experience during the last few days of our stay. I will almost certainly publish images of the final result of the painting when there is a final result. But this is mostly just thinking, ruminating, rummaging.
I told Jer this morning that I should be able to “finish” these canvases in another two days. Tonight I’m not so sure. But I’m not going to show any more photos of them until I’m fairly confident that I’ve done as much as I can see to do. The panorama does have a name, which for me means it’s close to being done. I’m calling it “Unoriented: The Amargosa Desert.”
I spent an hour this afternoon (when my eyes and brain could no longer deal with painting itself) reflecting on what I had wanted to achieve and what factors were involved in getting me to this stage of the work. I wrote these “reflections” down in my notebook, knowing that by this evening I’d be totally clueless as to what I was thinking at 2:30 PM.
It’s very nice to have a handsome notebook, even though when I read back through this month’s entries, I often haven’t a clue what I was talking about.
Recently I wrote: “The (dis/un) orientation of shadows.” I know what that phrasing refers to. I have a large shadow advancing across the desert basin in one direction, while on the bluff that intersects it, the foliage has shadows going the other way.
One of my goals was to un-orient the landscape, to prevent it from being readily understood (hence readily dismissed). At the same time, I’m painting “representationally” so the shadows are definitely shadows, even if dis/un oriented.
But in a way, I am well oriented. A huge factor in being able to accomplish as much as I have is the set-up in which I am working.
The Red Barn, while only 4 miles from the 1000-population town of Beatty, is over the Bullfrog Hills from the hamlet. You look west and see the mountains that line Death Valley. East from the Barn you see the Bare Mountains that terminate at Beatty, but not Beatty itself. I didn’t know how important the clear unstructured view of the Basin was until a group of vacationers set up camp across from the Barn. They were only there a few days, but suddenly my sense of space was totally disrupted. I waved them good-by this morning.
The Barn doors have been open every day I’ve worked here (I think I missed about five days in the Barn out of the 29 I’ve been in Beatty.) This openness is miraculous: for the most part, it adds to the comfort; the north wind doth blow, but the sun comes in the doors from the south and heats the place. But more than that, it allows me to feel myself part of the desert, yet sheltered from the worst of wind and sun and dryness. Maybe that’s cheating, but it has made painting these canvases relatively comfortable, even possible, given their sizes.
Another factor is the isolation and consistency with which I can work. I don’t drive, so Jer drops me off at 9 and picks me up at 4. We have no way to communicate, so if I’m brain-dead at 2, I still have two hours to fill (and no bed to nap in) before he’ll arrive to pick me up. My days are all pretty much the same. I have the occasional visitor, and half a mile or so away is the road to the ghost town, so I see distant vehicles going by, too far to hear unless they are a cavalcade of motorcycles. There are volunteers at the Museum building, who sometimes come by, and an occasional Beatty friend shows up. But mostly I have days like today, when the greatest excitement arrives when a crow gives me a shout-out and a big RV turns around in front of the Barn.
I am not entirely isolated, yet I have hours and hours of being insulated from other concerns, time in which to work and think. I can’t sit down without being confronted with the canvases, which stare at me as I drink my diet soda. They always draw me back to painting. Now I have my new pentatonic flute to occupy me, but it gets mucked up with spit and starts to sound dreary after a little, so back I go to the canvases. The canvases are always there, waiting, patiently, but needing more work.
One observation I hadn’t expected is that mostly all I have to work with here is color. Shape and form are simple and small. All the rest is moved and directed and oriented (or dis/un-oriented) by color. This isn’t usually the case for me, and it’s really made me see and work on color. [I still have one last big color problem to sort out — tomorrow if possible.]
This insistence on color means that everything I look at now has specific meaning for me in its color — the lavenders, the pinks, the red ochres, the grays that are undercoated with red ochre, the rhyolites and slates; moreover, the sun imposes itself on every surface and facet that it can touch and changes the color with its rays, but those colors get shifted with the ever-present wind, bending a new facet into view and sweeping the old one away just when I think I understand it. Even the mist and haze shift with the winds and the sun and change the distant colors of mountains. The only stable element is the earth itself, the cut-out shapes of the mountains and the blank distance of the sage basin.
Even the sounds here in the barn are un-oriented, if happily familiar. The tin roof keeps up a continual jangle and chatter, and the wind blows through the holes in the roof, not whistling but whooing. Sometimes it sounds like a car driving up the tarmac; sometimes it sounds like a jeep coming down the gravel road. And sometimes the drone and ring and rattle of the roof disguises the real vehicles so I am startled when a visitor appears at the Barn doors, even though the parking space for vehicles is directly in front of them.
I am not unoriented in my space — the four walls of the barn, with its high roof and rafter structures and open doors surround me; I know intimately how far it is from the furthest canvas to the barn door where I check the shape of a mountain in the distance. The sense of time — pick-up at 4 PM, leave Beatty for Portland by December 12th — these elements also orient me, giving me a sense of goal and urgency that an unoriented reality wouldn’t have.
I began the process knowing what I was facing. I came with lots of good materials with which to do the work. I came with Jer, who structures our Beatty life. I have had help from good friends here in town, and Suzanne and Charles lent out their eyes, helping me with the insights I need to finish the work adequately. I read about the desert in W.L. Fox’s books and about “Space and Place” in Yi-Fu Tuan. I had words of wisdom from Jef Gunn and fellow critique members. I painted the Oregon high desert to practice and the Oregon Coast to practice some more. It has been a journey, which tried to suss out how not to paint a goal. I’m almost there. Another day — or two. It’s a conundrum as well as an adventure.
Here’s a view south from the Red Barn on November 14, 2009; I would guess this was taken about 10:30 AM, which I know because that’s the way things south sometimes look at 10:30 AM.
And below is a Maynard Dixon painting:
Maynard Dixon, Edge of the Amargosa Desert, 1927
There’s always company on this path we tread, deserted, unoriented as it may seem.
Reporting from The Goldwell House in Beatty Nevada, four miles and 3 hours (in today time) from the Red Barn.
June:
My how time flies. Having picked up your story in bits and pieces, it seems that you just unrolled your canvas – and here you are wrapping it up.
Your comment about dis/un oriented shadows reminds me of a show that I caught yesterday called “Gauguin Paris 1889”. Rarely did I see shadows helping to shape his compositions; light and shadow seeming to be extraneous to his concerns. In one instance, however, he chose to paint a dog into the extreme lower left of a canvas. The splay of its legs would indicate that the creature was lying down, but an associated shadow of a standing dog would suggest otherwise. A similarity might be the long shadow of a mountain at midday.
Does anything stir in the desert at night? As fascinating as an isolated figure might be by day, traversing the plain before the distant mountains, the same figure, carrying a light in the darkness might be even more so.
This goes back to something I call savanna sense, finding distant things in the landscape particularly interesting as they may represent potential prey or danger. I assume that an older part of my brain is called up at these times. Beatty and the Old Brain 2009. I can see myself trying to paint such a landscape according to a number of intellectual and procedural precepts while my atavistic noggin is ticking over.
Glad to see that you and Jer enjoyed a good Thanksgiving.
Jay,
Your “atavistic noggin” always has more fantastic notions than my pedestrian nose can sniff out.
We don’t go out much at night and I’ve never been at the barn after dark. But now that you mention it, the moon is almost full right now. If I get this project done, I will investigate the night scene. There are actually a relatively large number of paved roads that are visible here and there across the Barn landscape (also lots of tracks across the desert). So I would see traffic crawling along the edge of Bare Mountain, five or so miles in the distance, and perhaps an occasional vehicle zinging east from Death Valley, hoping to reach civilization before exhaustion.
The shadow thing is weird, but I think it works as I want it to. I don’t know if what I’m thinking approaches what Picasso et al were thinking — I just want some anomalies to appear to the viewer who spends a bit of time, so that the verbal explanation will make more sense. Most people don’t look closely; nor do they read the words. So I suspect one in a hundred (if a hundred actually view) will look suspiciously at the shadows and say “huh?”
I have sometimes thought I should have a pair of binoculars to check out the distant things in the landscape. However, around here I think they might be merely jeeps, bouncing through the draws. We see burros once in a while and the tarantulas were migrating when we arrived, but we haven’t heard a coyote. Crows, though, keep up their reputations as tricksters, maybe substituting for Coyote.
Jun e:
I promise to say “Huh?”. Could you give me a quick take on what Picasso et al were thinking – might be part of the ongoing dialogue that I missed.
The binoculars will emphasize a difficult thing: heat shimmer. viewing will give you all sorts of wavy ephemera, objects seemingly hanging in air, pools of fake water. Makes one think of oh so solid matter as viewed at really great magnification. What’s funny for me is the relativity of it. The person miles away across the burning sand is rendered a specter in a cosmic dance, while the specter, solid from his or her point of view, is likely to see me in much the same way.
I pity the crow. It doesn’t fly very well and is easily picked off by raptors.
June,
How do you paint the always shifting colors?
…the sun imposes itself on every surface and facet that it can touch and changes the color with its rays, but those colors get shifted with the ever-present wind, bending a new facet into view and sweeping the old one away…
Birgit,
With great difficulty. And at the end, without looking at the desert, just trying to make a painting that works, using colors that align with the already set colors. That might have been a mistake; I’ll let you know.
Jay, I meant Gaugin, not Picasso, and I’m assuming your noggin will tell you what he was thinking about shadows. I certainly can’t.
I finished all I can do on the panels here at Goldwell; I made final serious revisions twice after jer showed up to drag me home. But now the panels have to dry enough to be rolled, so I can’t do any more. Thank heavens!
And the desert at winter twilight is magical, although the temperature was about 65, so “winter” is a matter of dates, not sensations.