Julian Watts likes to collect sticks. The artist has a barn full of them, and spends a lot of time searching for new ones on the five-acre property in Alpine, Oregon, where he lives with his partner, three cats, and dog. Sometimes, he’ll carry twigs around with him as he explores the area, which includes a wooden house (“It used to be a creepy hippie tower,” Watts says) and a workshop on top of a hill that opens onto a flower-filled meadow, a vegetable garden, and a bog hemmed in by ash trees. Some of the sticks become the medium for his mystical works, which he chisels and sands by hand into blobby forms that are at once gorgeous and grotesque.