Visitors mingle at the Many Hands Art Studio and Gallery in Myrtle Point in November. Contributed Photo

It’s the middle of November on Oregon’s South Coast, and the only creatures stirring are the spiders. Yesterday I swept vast and complex webs from the exterior of my house. This morning, like magic, they have returned.

I drive south on Highway 42, past Beaver Slough and China Creek and the watery fields alongside the Coquille River. Autumn’s flashy foliage is a sodden, gravy-colored mush at the side of the road.

This is the time for interior landscapes, I think. Give me one of those exquisitely lit, 19th-century portraits by John Singer Sargent — interesting people in perfectly rendered clothing, posed next to a baronial fireplace.

I am on my way to visit the watercolorist Terry Magill. She is hosting the grand opening of her Many Hands Art Studio and Gallery, a cheery yellow concrete structure adjacent to the Myrtle Point Veterinary Clinic.

Magill has been an artist all her life. She grew up during the 1950s in the Puget Sound area, south of Tacoma, where she recalls the beaches and forests as being “much emptier.” “At age 9 or 10 I was out painting boats on the dock,” she remembers. “At that time, nationally known artists would travel the coast ... My mom and dad drove me for lessons.”

Magill honed her eyes and hands, developing skills that eventually earned her a career in scientific illustration. She was invited to George Washington University, where she worked with the head of the department of anatomy, Dr. Richard Snell, illustrating his series of medical textbooks, “Atlas of Clinical Anatomy.”

Living in Washington, D.C., during the Watergate years, Magill’s art flourished. She was honored with an invitation to speak at the Smithsonian Institution, before the prestigious Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.

“I spoke to the Guild as a guest, and did a demonstration of a head and neck,” she said. “I used illustration board with tempura paints — gouache — because with opaque, you can make corrections.

“The Smithsonian was so much fun. There were so many layers, like a maze. I got a few titillating peeks into some of their rooms ... .”

Terry Magill was encouraged to stay in Washington to continue her work, but, she tells me, the West Coast called her home. For more than 20 years she has painted and taught art in Oregon and Northern California. Visitors to the Coos Art Museum voted Magill the CAM Biennial People’s Choice Award in 2004, leading to an exhibit of her watercolors in CAM’s atrium gallery during the spring of 2005. About that show she wrote, “The fishing boats, sun-washed cliffs, farmhouses, fields and forests, or even the quiet little objects of everyday living compel me to trace their forms with hand and heart.”

When I arrive at the Many Hands Studio, I find my John Singer Sargent — “Corfu: Lights & Shadow.” It is in a small room at the back of the studio, next to a service-able workspace floored with ancient 1-by-6 boards; a cinder block wall painted white for display; and bright windows free of spider webs.

The Sargent is a watercolor of a simple white building, framed on one side by a suggestion of trees.

“If I could paint like that,” Magill sighs. She is holding her 9-year-old silver Schnauzer, Pepper, and together we gaze at the print. Magill points at the color transitions, and the shadows that appear to move along the wall — some crisp, others smudged. “He makes you feel the wind is moving through the trees,” says the artist.

We walk back into the studio’s main room, now noisy and warm with a dozen chatting visitors and the music of a mandolin, played by Bryan Ibach of the Bumbling Buskers.

A metal open-wire crate filled with smooth round stones nestles next to a wood burning stove. The stones accept the stove’s heat, and will return it to the room long after visitors and artist depart.