Playa Works: The Myth Of The Empty

Painting the Playa: Smoke Creek Desert

Painting the Playa: Smoke Creek Desert 125 Painting the Playa Smoke Creek Desert 126 PlayaWorks Michael Moore, a tall, genial artist in his mid-fifties from the San Francisco Bay Area, is sitting on a seat hacked out of an enormous white tree trunk that’s beached on its side at the edge of the Smoke Creek playa in Northern Nevada. Linda Fleming, a sculptor and Mike’s wife, has created several works here, this vantage point among them. Mike and others helped drag “The Behemoth,” as they refer to the poplar-tree trunk, out here to the edge of the sands, where she cleaned it off and transformed it into a sitting sculpture. Behind us, the truncated remains of the root system reach out like a giant maw seeking to devour the view westward. This late May afternoon, Mike and I are perched on the more friendly end, watching a dust storm blow itself out on the eastern side of the playa.Dark storm clouds had followed me this morning as I drove the 120 miles north from Reno and across the narrow neck of alkali flats that connect the Black Rock and Smoke Creek deserts. Rain is a promise made and broken here more often than not, today being no exception, although the mountains to the south by Pyramid Lake are obscured now by what might be a thunderstorm. With the wind coming up this hard from the south, it’s impossible to separate rain from blowing dust at a distance. Mike and Linda are just finishing an expansion to their house, sitting about a quarter of a mile behind us, which will bring up their desert retreat from city life to around 1,200 square feet of living space, not counting Linda’s separate 24-foot-by-24-foot sculpture studio. They aren’t the first artists to settle here,but the most recent.To my left and north are the trees that mark the springs at the end of the playa where another California escapee,John Bogard,established the Planet X pottery in 1974, making functional crockery that often depicts the playa on its surfaces. Understanding how Moore’s playa paintings fit into the art history of the region requires some digressions. The Black Rock, along with what’s sometimes considered its sister lobe, the Smoke Creek, have been legendary playas virtually since Frémont crossed the region in January 1844.Some emigrants chose to cross the Black Rock instead of the Forty Mile Desert to the southeast, Painting the Playa: Smoke Creek Desert 127 thinking the northern course would be a more-watered route. They were misled. Others were diverted from the main trail by Oregonians hoping they would take the Applegate-Lassen Cutoff to settle in that state instead of California—a trend that people in Portland now wish had never been started. But the Black Rock was, along with the western part of the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Forty Mile Desert, one of the most barren and waterless parts of the entire route; its cultural status was gained at first through misery, and only later through beauty. J. Goldsborough Bruff (1804–1889), a forty-five-year-old former draftsman for the U.S. Bureau of Topographical Engineers, left us a thorough record of the journey. The son of a physician and surrounded by family members who were engineers and artists, Bruff was apparently a bit of a strong-willed misfit. Allowed to resign from West Point when he was sixteen for fighting a duel,he went to sea,and by 1827 he was a naval draftsman responsible for drawing the complicated rigging of large ships as well as coastal fortifications and maps. He later designed much of the ornamental work for the U.S. Treasury Building, and in 1846 he drew the first official map of Florida as a state. Bruff was bitten by the gold bug in early 1849 and decided to light out for the California hills.He thought he might put his topographical skills to use, so, in addition to forming the Washington City and California Mining Association—a company of sixty-four men to head West—he decided he would keep a detailed and illustrated journal of the trip and afterward publish a guidebook to the trail. The group left Washington in April 1849; when entering the Black Rock on September 21st...