MARK WAITE / PVT Duane Webb stands next to a piece of his art work on display at the Charleston Peak RV Park Clubhouse, which is next to the Pahrump Valley Winery. Advertisement

Duane Webb could relax around the Charleston Peak Recreational Vehicle Park Clubhouse while showing his art exhibit Friday, but there once was a time in his life when things were a touch less relaxed.

Back in 1968-69 the Tucson, Ariz., native was serving in the Navy on the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam, developing film for reconnaissance pilots who verified the pilots' bombing missions.

"I passed my draft physical so I was encouraged to enlist," Webb said jokingly. "I saw more of Vietnam than most people, only I saw more of it on film.

"My job was to take the negatives and make positives, transparencies. Then interpreters look at the photos and determined how the pilots did their job hitting targets," he said.

Pilots didn't just fly out and start bombing, Webb said. Reconnaissance crews would identify targets for the pilots. These crews then, after an attack, verified whether the targets were hit.

"The heavy reconnaissance planes, the bigger planes, had automatic camera systems on them. The navigator would press the button and take a picture of it," Webb said.

"Reconnaissance planes have to go back and see if it's done, or the planes that do the bombing will have to go back and do it again."

His hobby of photography, which dates to his days editing his high school yearbook, may have saved him from more hazardous military duty.

"Nobody was shooting at me," he quipped.

Before he was sent to Vietnam, he served on the public relations staff at Kingsville Naval Air Station in Texas, where he said his work varied from day to day, covering officers getting their flight wings one day to an admiral's tour the next.

"One day you might be covering a plane crash, the next day you might be covering an officer's tea party," Webb said.

A native of Tooele, Utah, his father and grandfather were both miners. He settled in Pahrump in 1990.

His artwork includes different artistic settings juxtaposed over each other. A photo of a statue next to Caesars Palace is juxtaposed next to other scenes to make a surrealistic image. Webb can take a windmill in Pahrump and "fantasize a little bit," or a close-up shot of the Statue of Liberty with exaggerated colors to add an element of abstraction.

"I've been drawing and painting all my life. I do the photography as research for my paintings," Webb said. "My philosophy was if I wanted a photograph, I'd enlarge it to be a photograph because I'm a good photographer. But I don't want my paintings to look like photographs."

Webb said his artwork will be on display along with the work of other artists at the clubhouse until Oct. 20.

His art work is also on display at the Pahrump Community Library through this month.

The Charleston Peak RV Peak Clubhouse is one of four locations in Pahrump where the Pahrump Arts Council displays artwork. The others include the Nye County Courthouse, the Pahrump Senior Citizens Center and the Pahrump Community Library.