Black Rock Desert: A knitter's, painter's paradise?

What if you could wear the Black Rock Desert?

You could wear the sagebrush, and the canyons and the thunderstorms.

Virginia Catherall, a fiber artist who knits items inspired by landscapes, was one of two artists-in-residence for the Friends of the Black Rock-High Rock this year.  Catherall and Lewis Williams, a plein air artist who paints desert scapes with a stylized touch of religious icon painting, each spent two weeks in Northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Altogether, they created about three dozen stunning works that will be on display during an exhibition that opens Friday in Gerlach and thereafter will be moved to Reno from Oct. 5 through 15.

Wearing the desert

“It can be really desolate. If you need the trees and green then you’ll be disappointed, but it has its own spaces and colors. The solitude is part of its beauty,” said Catherall, who stayed at a ranch about 20 miles outside of Gerlach for her two weeks at the end of May. “It’s you and the raw wilderness out there.”

Catherall, a 47-year-old museum education curator from Salt Lake City, produced about 15 wool pieces throughout the summer following her Black Rock Desert stay. One of her favorites is a wrap that is spotted with spring sagebrush shrubs that shrink with distance.

Another is her cyanometer, a thick wool ring that fades from dark blue to almost white, and was a tool invented in the 1700s to measure the hue of the sky.

“What I try to do is capture the essence of the landscape. It’s not every aspect of the landscape, it’s just a portion. Sometimes it’s the color, sometimes it’s the shape and sometimes it’s the texture,” Catherall said.

One of her pieces, a cozy neck muffler, is a wool interpretation of the ubiquitous mud cracks in the playa. Another piece is a wide lace ring that is colored with the vivid pumpkin orange, sky blue and mossy green hues of Fly Geyser, a man made geyser in the area.

“I would always look at the landscape and wish I could capture the beauty, but I am not much of a drawer or a painter,” Catherall said.

Catherall has been making landscape-based wearables for about seven years, she said, although she learned from her grandmother how to knit when she was a child. She stopped practicing, however, when she realized how ugly the majority of her grandmother’s homemade items were, she said.

It was not until graduate school that she picked it up again after a doctor told her that stress was causing her to grind her teeth and that she should take up knitting to decompress, she said.

“It’s become a part of my life now,” she said.

Catherall feels an emotional connection to her work, as it makes her recall all the sights, sounds and smells of a place when she is wearing a piece inspired by it, and she wants others to be able to share that. While she does not sell her work, she sells patterns for the work that she creates.

“I want my art to be accessible,” said Catherall, who will be at the closing reception of the exhibition.

Re-seeing the desert

Williams, 66, of Montrose, Colo., has always been drawn to deserts.

“I love the desert, it’s my thing. I went to Alaska for a year, and I didn’t realize the desert was my place. I was like in pain,” Williams said.

When he found out that he would be spending two weeks in the Black Rock Desert in June, he thought perhaps that the location might be too remote, but he fell immediately in love with the area.

“I just love that first reaction when you get on the playa,” Williams said. “It’s hard to put into words how you feel when you get out there on that flat desert.”

Williams created 20 oil paintings that are a “window” into the playa, and the prism of colors that it can be broken into were it be interpreted through stained glass.

The thick strokes that separate the grain in the wood, the shadows in the mountains and the puffs in the clouds are not accidental, as they are an element he started incorporating after he became interested in painting religious icons while living in New Mexico. Those same lines can be found in much of the traditional Southwest portraits of religious figures, Williams said.

“I began doing plein air competitions four years ago, and a lot of the work was very similar to each other,” Williams said. “I thought, ‘Why should I just be another one of them? What if I combined elements with the icons and combined it with the landscapes?’ Icons are supposed to be a window between worlds, so icons are stylized to be not of this world. So you’ll see my clouds and smoke turn into spirals, and my plants are almost cartoonish.”

During his time in the Black Rock Desert, Williams was most drawn to the bodies of water scattered about the area, including the litter of hot springs on the outskirts of the desert.

In fact, one of his favorite images is one of the Black Rock Spring, a hot spring that is on the Emigrant Trail and is near a few abandoned artifacts from years gone by.

Michael Myers, executive director of Friends of the Black Rock-High Rock, said that he was beyond impressed with the work of Williams and Catherall, both of whom captured the essence of the Black Rock Desert in their work.

“Both of them have awe-inspiring pieces. As someone who knows the area very well, I don’t even have to know where it is to know just by looking at the pieces,” Myers said. “You get to see these different perspectives of the Black Rock Desert. It’s great.”

Friends of the Black Rock-High Rock artists in residence exhibition

What: Friends of the Black Rock-High Rock artists in residence exhibition

Where:

Gerlach Community Center, on Cottonwood St. in Gerlach (Oct. 2)

Sierra Arts Foundation gallery at 17 S. Virginia St #120 in Reno (Oct. 5-15)

When:

Opening reception

12 to 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2 at Gerlach Community Center

Exhibition

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, Oct. 5 through 15 at Sierra Arts Foundation gallery

Closing reception

5 p.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15 for Friends of Black Rock-High Rock and Sierra Arts Foundation members

6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, open to public

*Refreshments courtesy of Wild River Grille will be served.

For any questions about the Friends of the Black Rock-High Rock artist-in-residence program, contact the nonprofit at 775-557-2900 or by email at m.myers@blackrockdesert.org.