By Richard Stephens – Special to the Pahrump Valley Times

Watching these two artists paint side-by-side in the Red Barn Art Center studio at Rhyolite is reminiscent of a scene from the movie “Lust for Life,” in which Van Gogh and Gauguin are painting the same scene.
The conflicting personalities are missing, but the contrast in artistic style and vision could hardly be greater.
Current Goldwell Open Air Museum artist in residence Polly Townsend invited artist friend Siobhan King to join her in artistic exploration of the desert landscape.
The two women met as a result of their husbands’ work as diplomats. Townsend’s husband is stationed in the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., and King’s is in the Belgian Embassy.
Townsend has traveled the world seeking out the rugged, pristine landscapes she loves to paint. She has, for example, explored and painted in Tibet, Kashmir, Outer Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan. Previously focused on depicting the human figure, Townsend finds similar structures and colors in mountainous landscapes.
That is one thing she is enjoying about the landscape of the desert in and around Death Valley.
“There’s a lot of my kind of color around here,” she says, saying she is “quite obsessed with bodily tones.”
She loves the mountains in the area.
“I never feel lonely in the mountains,” says Townsend. “I feel free in the mountains, with their large vistas, and sort of insignificant. I like feeling insignificant.”
Interestingly, while Townsend’s landscapes depict crisp and solid forms and King’s dissolve emotional atmospherics, Townsend says that she is the one who sees movement and change in the mountainous landscape, while King sees it as static.
“From having to spend many years in the mountains, I know there is constant change,” she says.
Townsend typically works on small paintings on location and then paints larger versions taking several months to complete in the studio. (For her anything less than about five feet on a side is a small painting.)
King also does most of her finished work later in the studio after returning from a place.
“My work may be about remembered places,” she says. “When I go back and begin to paint, it becomes an experience. You don’t immediately know how you feel about the landscape — it’s what stays with you.”
The paintings do not depict the physical reality of the landscape, but the emotional and aesthetic experience of it.
One similarity you notice as you watch them work is that both have ear buds in place and are listening to the radio or music.
“If I don’t have the radio, the painting gets too self-conscious,” says Townsend. King says this makes the painting experience “less intense,” and Townsend says it makes it more “instinctive” so that the creative mind is not hampered by the cumulative weight of art history and training.
Both artists praised the Red Barn facility. 
“It’s amazing,” said Townsend, “the best studio I’ve ever had,” and King called it the “perfect studio.”
King, who has lived in Africa and China, said the landscape here was “not the desert I expected. There are more shrubs and colors than I expected.”
The two artists are savoring their time working together, especially as they are about to be separated by Townsend’s husband being transferred to France.