The front window of the Rainbow Cafe boasts a sign marking the first stop of a downtown-wide exhibit of some of Doherty’s work from 49 years of painting windows in the weeks preceding the Pendleton Round-Up.

PENDLETON — Artist Laurie Doherty knows her paintings have life spans only slightly longer than sandcastles.

And she’s fine with that.

For 49 straight years, she painted cartoon cowboys, bulls and broncs onto the windows of Pendleton businesses in the weeks before the Pendleton Round-Up. A short time later, they came off with soap and water as soon as the rodeo crowd left town.

This year, Doherty would have marked a half century as a Round-Up window painter. She’d started arranging clients. Then came COVID-19 and the 2020 Round-Up was canceled. Doherty’s 50th year of painting windows before the rodeo was called off too.

Instead, the Pendleton Center for the Arts arranged an exhibition as unique as Doherty’s paintings themselves to honor the window painter. The downtown-wide exhibit celebrates the artist’s work, featuring images of past windows and interpretive information. Find a map at https://pendletonarts.org/50-years/ showing 14 businesses with displays.

Doherty, 73, missed her early morning sessions painting Round-Up scenes onto glass this year, though she painted some St. Patrick’s Day windows before the lockdown, keeping her 50-year string of window painting intact.

She is happiest with a paintbrush in her hand. Doherty, who has dealt with depression most of her life, says painting is a form of therapy.

The daughter of a uranium miner, she attended nine grade schools and three high schools growing up in Colorado and Utah. As a child, she drew cartoons, sometimes tacking them to the walls of her sleeping quarters inside one mining cabin or another. Eventually, she grew up and landed in Pendleton, where she has raised three sons.

Her interest in painting windows was sparked while watching “Big Tom” Simonton create scenes on windows around town. She tried some of her own windows with varied success. She admits some of her earliest efforts were washed off by unhappy shop owners, but she improved with persistence.

Onlookers sometimes offered tips. One intoxicated voyeur startled her with boozy advice about how to improve the look of her caricatures’ skin, which came out as “fresh stones” instead of flesh tones. But the advice was sound: “Start with white paint and a little orange, and add browns and yellows in minute amounts to vary the skin tones and match the caricature’s heritage.”

When a 10-year-old boy mentioned that he’d seen Doherty’s mentor Simonton fix his mistakes with razor blades, she stocked up on them.

The amount of work ebbed and flowed. One year, she painted 300 windows. Another, she managed only three. That was the year she had a car wreck at Deadman Pass and had to paint from a wheelchair.

Doherty does other projects as well. In 2017, she painted a special door for the Juniper House Memory Care unit. Some of the unit’s 16 residents were exhibiting signs of Sundown Syndrome, getting agitated and disoriented late in the day. Some banged at the door to get out. Doherty painted a bucolic scene on the double doors with a mountain, a pond and animals as some of the residents watched her work. Afterward, the nightly banging all but stopped.

In 2010, Doherty worked at the Oregon Historical Society Museum in Portland, painting cartoon bulls and broncs on the museum’s large front windows. Inside was an exhibit called “Tall in the Saddle: 100 Years of the Pendleton Round-Up.”

Round-Up Director Tiah DeGrofft said she missed seeing Doherty’s paintings this year around the Pendleton downtown core.

“The window paintings Laurie’s done for our local businesses over the years are as much a part of Round-Up as the Mounted Band and the Cowboy Breakfast,” DeGrofft said. “I grew up with them. They’re iconic and they truly capture the spirit of Pendleton. She did a caricature of me as a princess that I adored.”

Arts Center Director Roberta Lavadour said the project honoring Doherty was a natural.

“We wanted to give people a safe and fun way to celebrate Laurie and her work,” Lavadour said. “People can stroll from one end of Main to the other on both sides, taking detours to the side streets and encounter all sorts of things along the way.”

The Pendleton Center for the Arts received funding from the Pendleton Round-Up Association and several other local donors for the project.

Doherty was humbled when she heard about the exhibit of her window work.

“I felt very elated and very, very thankful I live in the community I do … I have had many people tell me how sorry they are that I was not able to paint windows my 50th year,” she said.