‘A Tortured Land’

MOSES LAKE — Central Washington artist Don Nutt will return this month to the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center after a long time away, according to an announcement from the museum. 

“It’s been over a decade since we had the pleasure of showing his work in our space,” Museum Communication Coordinator Natalia Zuyeva wrote in the announcement. 

Nutt’s show, entitled “A Tortured Land,” will open Sept., 12 with a reception at the museum. Refreshments will be served, according to the announcement, and patrons will have a chance to meet Nutt in person. 

Nutt has been an artist since he was 5 years old, he told the Columbia Basin Herald in an interview last year. He sold his first painting in 1974, and has been painting full-time for 19 years, 17 of those in his Cariboo Trail Studio in downtown Coulee City. He has also organized the Coulee City Art Walk for several years, in which local artists set up in local businesses  

Nutt works mostly in oils, and his favorite subject is the country around him. 

“The coulees, lakes, and creeks of the Columbia Basin, the Waterville Plateau, and the mighty Columbia have been a source of inspiration for me for more than half a century of painting,” he wrote in the museum’s announcement. “I have roots here. My great-grandfather homesteaded west of Coulee City, and my mother’s family farmed during the origin of the Columbia Basin Project. This connection to the land and the history of the Big Bend provides an unparalleled source of inspiration for me.” 

Nutt gets his inspiration from hiking around the area and sketching what he sees, he said, and then taking those back and turning them into full-fledged oil paintings. He used to paint on location, he said, but found that unwieldy. 

“The thing about a four-foot-wide canvas is, it’s a sail,” he said. “It’s really hard to anchor those down enough to (paint on them). I used to do a little bit of plein air painting, but I changed techniques and it makes it very difficult. What I do now is a lot of transparent glazes and I have to let the paint dry in between layers. I usually had three or four paintings going at once. But I've been doing that for so long now that it's actually kind of difficult to go out, paint plein air and try and get a painting done.” 

Now he mostly works from sketches he makes while hiking around, he said, or sometimes from photos.  

“But at some point or another, I kind of discard the photo,” Nutt said. “I don't want a painting of a photograph, I want a painting from something I experienced. So I wind up changing the color range quite a bit, usually in the painting, from what I see in the photograph. I'm trying to paint what I remember more than what's in the photo.” 

Along with the exhibition opening, the reception will include Art After Hours, an adults-only craft time. Participants will have a chance to use watercolors to paint their own masterpiece of stacked stones, Zuyeva wrote in the announcement. 

“This collection of oil paintings portrays many of my favorite views of Big Bend country, as well as some abandoned places, some of which no longer exist,” Nutt wrote in the announcement. 

    Don Nutt’s “Horsetails and Purple Sage” will be one of the oil paintings on display at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center.
  

    “Summer Solstice – Dry Falls” by Don Nutt shows the rich colors and majesty of the Big Bend country.