Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
In touch with nature through painting with ranger
Park program focuses on art with landscapes
Under a bright-blue sky speckled with tiny white clouds and framed by red-brown mountains west of Las Vegas, eight aspiring artists set out Saturday morning to capture the desert’s beauty with water paints.
“I’ll be your painting ranger today,” park interpreter David Low said to the smaller-than-usual group of eight. Low is Spring Mountain Ranch State Park’s historian, and he organizes the park’s events and runs the visitor center and gift shop.
“My job is to help you discover why this park is important to you personally.”
Low showed the group three paintings and asked them to draw conclusions about the artists and their subjects. The first, a simple cave painting of horselike animals and a rhino, was painted 30,000 years ago in France, he said.
“The thing that I think is most interesting about it is that this piece of art allows us to reach back and make a connection with a person who’s no longer here — someone who’s been gone for 30,000 years,” Low said. “That’s time travel. You guys just traveled through time.”
The painting didn’t show just what the artist saw, but what she felt, Low said.
The monthly, yearlong Paint with a Ranger program, which usually meets its 15-person registration limit, started after Low spent a summer working for the National Park Service at the former home of impressionist painter Julian Alden Weir. His boss at that national historic site in Connecticut gave him a hat, a brown shirt and paint supplies and told him to go outside and paint for two hours every day during his first week on the job.
“I really don’t think I had painted since the second grade,” Low said. “It was terrifying because I had no idea what I was doing and I thought that it was going to be bad. And that was when I realized it isn’t about being good or bad; it’s just about seeing things.”
Low led the group to a pasture lined by a white fence. Three cows watched lazily from a far corner as the painters-for-the-day settled under the shade of a large tree and went to work.
“I’m not really good at painting!” exclaimed 7-year-old Jeremiah Cortez, flopping onto a denim blanket with his palette and paper. He opted to paint one of the cows, because “cows are nature and I like nature a little bit.”
Jeremiah’s sister, 9-year-old Bianca Cortez, stood behind the blanket wearing a paint-spattered apron, her canvas propped on an easel. Her mother, Frances Cortez, said Bianca started with finger paints as a baby and never stopped. She hummed as she painted.
“I’m painting the black cow and the tree that it’s under,” Bianca said without looking up from her canvas. “The cow is a little fascinating.”
The youngest artist of the bunch, 4-year-old Bryana Ruffin, streaked her paper with oranges, blues and purples before painting a black circle that spread toward the edges.
“Ranger, I’m done,” she said softly to Low.
It was a painting of the white house next to the pasture, she told him.
“That’s great!” Low said with enthusiasm. “I like that the trees are blue.”
The rest of the group, including three adults, worked intently on their paintings of distant cliff faces and the giant tree that shaded them. Low handed out another piece of paper, this one the size of a baseball card, and challenged them to create a “five-minute masterpiece.”
“Parks are generally places you can go to get away from the speed of modern life, but even when you’re here you’re probably looking at your phone, you’re probably thinking about what you’ve got at home and at work,” Low said. “Painting engages your senses in such a way that you can’t think of anything else.”
Sitting cross-legged in the grass, he pulled a paintbrush from behind his ear, adjusted his park ranger hat and continued working on his own miniature landscape painting.
“Las Vegas is a place that continually reinvents itself. Getting people to make some kind of connection with a ranch from the 1870s in Las Vegas is kind of a tall order,” Low said. “So this is how I do it.” Potential visitors can find information about upcoming park events at http://parks.nv.gov or on the park’s Facebook page: https://www. facebook.com/SpringMountainRanchStatePark/?fref=ts.