Have you ever happened upon the perfect colleague or collaborator—and heard your world expand with a cosmic click? That’s exactly what happened to two well-known local landscape painters, Phyllis Shafer and Ahren Hertel.
Shafer, who lives in South Lake Tahoe, has been painting Sierra scenes—the less-traveled ones that local outdoorsy types know, not so much the picture-perfect influencer haunts—since she arrived in the West in 1994, already an experienced artist by then. Her creeks seem to babble; her wildflowers seem to sway; and her perspectives are enchantingly distorted. Think a wide-angle lens or iPhone panorama, although when she paints, she stands outside with her easel for hours, and no camera is involved.
Hertel lives in Reno. He also paints landscapes—the hills and sage we know and love around here—using muted versions of every yellow, green and gray you’d spot in a wide, Nevada valley, and then some. His scenes are heavy with stillness. His brushstrokes are more abstract than realistic, but the feeling they convey—that of an overcast, high desert day (even if he’s painting on a sunny day)—lands with precision.
Shafer taught painting and ran the gallery at Lake Tahoe Community College until 2021 and is now retired. She said that her sense of time is different post-retirement, and that has changed the look of her paintings: “There’s more information, and the brushes are getting smaller.”
Hertel teaches painting full-time at the University of Nevada, Reno, and is the father of a 3-year-old, so he has less studio time than he used to. His paintings typically start with a photo as source material, and he paints indoors, filtering the image through layers of memories and ideas.
Here’s why Hertel admires Shafer’s work: “I really like things that feel like they border on the magical and the real”—like Gabriel García Márquez novels or Día de los Muertos.
Here’s why Shafer enjoys Hertel’s work: “He has a real feel for the land, and specifically the Nevada high desert, rugged kind of landscapes. But I really love his understanding of color theory. It’s so different than mine. He works in a smaller range, and I just think it’s exquisite. Somehow, the paintings almost feel like they’re about to evaporate.”
All of this is why Shafer, who has long been on Stremmel Gallery’s calendar for a November show, asked the gallery to invite Hertel to be part of the show as well.
To prepare, the two decided to embark on a couple of field trips to paint together this past summer. They ventured to Hope Valley—in Shafer’s Sierra stomping grounds—on one day, and Fort Churchill State Historic Park, typical of Hertel’s Nevada locales, on another.
“People come from all over and wait for the opportunity to be able to paint outdoors with Phyllis,” Hertel said. (She teaches summer workshops at UNR’s Lake Tahoe campus.)
Said Shafer: “I think we talked about three-quarters of the time and painted about one quarter of the time. We get so excited when we’re talking together that I think we keep interrupting each other, because we get excited to kind of jump in. There’s just been such a great kind of collaboration on all levels.”
Experienced as they are, both artists said they learned something from these outings. For Shafer, the solitude of retirement is a two-sided coin: As nice as it is to have the additional painting time, she misses the daily interactions with students and peers.
“I miss having an intellectual dialogue with someone who I trust and I admire and I respect,” she said. “It’s just been really great to hear how Ahren thinks, and how he deconstructs things.” She sounded positively buoyant describing how Hertel puts “a very intellectual spin” on the paintings that she just makes intuitively, without analyzing as she works.
Shafer’s attitude toward painting rubbed off on Hertel in the opposite way: Talking with her inspired him to apply less intellect, not more. He’s prone to thinking a lot about how to approach a subject “that’s been painted so many times by so many people” and deeply analyzing its ramifications and meanings. But painting while chatting with Shafer? Five stars. Would do again.
“We’ve talked about thinking of it as an amazing subject that doesn’t come loaded with all this history and all this other stuff, and that we get to engage in it in the way that we want to,” Hertel said. “It was really cool to see how Phyllis has been doing that for longer than I have. … It was amazing just sitting there talking and sort of soaking it all in, and it was different than my normal practice.”
Confluence: The Landscapes of Phyllis Shafer and Ahren Hertel will be on view at Stremmel Gallery, at 1400 S. Virginia St., in Reno, from Thursday, Nov. 6, through Saturday, Dec. 6, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, and an artists’ talk at 11 a.m., Saturday, Nov. 8. For more information, visit stremmelgallery.com.