Melinda Whipplesmith-Plank is a fourth-generation Californian with a long family history in cattle ranching, first in the San Jose area, then in Scott Valley in Siskiyou County, where her family moved when she was four years old. Today she and her husband, Gareth, raise organic grass-fed beef on their Scott River Ranch (near the town of Etna), while placing 6,000 acres of their lands in conservancy with the Siskiyou Land Trust. (It might be said that conserving land and water is not the easiest agenda to promote in rural America.)
Melinda, a graduate of the University of Puget Sound, is very interested in preserving biodiversity and waterways, mainly through her art. Her creations bring attention to these elements and support conservation groups dedicated to preserving them.
Her medium is woodblock printing, a process that as she reports is time consuming, unforgiving, and unpredictable, but one that gives her immense joy when a final image is revealed.
To create a print in her studio in a one-hundred-year-old barn, Melinda uses Japanese tools to carve an image into a wooden plank. Then, in her words, “after carving, I roll ink onto the surface of the block, place a piece of paper on the top, and hand crank it through an etching press. Each color has to be rolled separately onto the carved blocks and run through the press. Manually applying the ink for each color layer makes each print unique, while displaying the artist’s hand.” The print shown here is named “Double Dippers.” As Melinda relates: “In the summer of 2017, the Smith River Alliance hosted me at their Rock Creek Ranch on the South Fork of the Smith River. Finally, I could dive into and explore that river and the deep, green pools that have long captivated me. My job was to create a print of the river running alongside their property to highlight this vital habitat. I tried to capture the translucent green of those deep clear waters and the attitudes of the American Dippers that nest amidst dripping ferns and cascading waterfalls. There are two!
“I carved the image on two shina plywood wooden plates which I then inked 15 times, each a separate run through the press. I did 360 runs for 24 original prints, with noticeable variations in each print due to differing ink applications. I donated one print to the Smith River Alliance for their fund-raising.”
Melinda’s family has long been involved in fly fishing. As a young girl, she tied flies on her father’s line as he plied the waters in northern California, while she practiced her own casting. Her husband is also an avid fly fisher. So too is a daughter — there are four — who guides each summer at a women’s fly-fishing retreat in Joseph, Oregon.
Melinda has been an artist-in-residence at Glacier National Park and Lassen Volcanic National Park. Her work is found in varied galleries and museums, and can be viewed at www.whipplesmithplank.com.
About the Smith River
Located near the Oregon border, the Smith River is one of California’s premier salmonid rivers. Its North Fork originates in Oregon and joins with the Middle Fork and South Fork to form the Smith River. With no manmade obstructions anywhere, this river system is the largest undammed, free-flowing system in California, with almost 400 miles included in a federally and state designated Wild and Scenic River system. Recently, almost all of the South Fork Smith and its tributaries were recognized by the state of California as both a Wild Trout Water and a Heritage Trout Water. These exquisitely beautiful rivers contain self-sustaining, native populations of both coastal cutthroat trout and coastal rainbow trout (steelhead). More information on the Smith River system is available from the Smith River Alliance; (www.smithriveralliance.org).