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Stephen Willard’s Mammoth Lakes Gallery Reopening

Stephen Willard, Convict Lake and Hangman's Tree

Portland art dealers Robert and Sue Joki were looking for an encore career to crown 25 years of success in the gallery business. They found their opening courtesy of the early Palm Springs photographer Stephen Willard. In May, 2013, the couple will reopen Willard’s Mammoth Lakes cabin and studio as a center for Sierra and Yosemite art. While Mammoth is not exactly smoke tree territory, the new Gallery at Twin Lakes is great news for followers of desert art. In California, the desert artists overlap with mountain artists, just as the mountains and deserts themselves overlap. Follow a desert artist…

The Smoketree Artists’ Historic Home Tour

By Ann Japenga

This article first appeared in Palm Springs Life, Winter/Spring 2013 Any Palm Springs visitor can board a bus and tour Liberace’s pad. With only a little more effort, you can see the view that inspired mystical visions from Agnes Pelton’s back porch or the Cathedral City home where R. Brownell McGrew came to love the desert so much he was later dubbed Rembrandt Under a Smoketree. Some of California’s greatest artists once lived in the Coachella Valley. More and more, art lovers are recognizing the power artists’ former homes and environs hold in telling the story of American art. As…

Millicent Harvey: A Boston Transplant Befriends the Smoke Tree

By Ann Japenga

I’ve pondered smoke trees more than most people, but over lunch with Millicent Harvey–a recent transplant from Boston to Palm Springs—I quickly realized I was the novice listening to a teacher far more experienced on the subject. The smoke tree is that silvery plant inhabiting our desert washes. For much of the year it’s dormant and gray. Most people never notice it, or if they do they assume it’s dead wood. Then, once a year, it erupts in reckless beauty with a profusion of indigo blooms. At any time of year, the early desert artists were able to glimpse the…

The New Naturalists: Borrego Landscape Painters

By Ann Japenga

Ed. Note: This article first appeared in the Fall, 2012, issue of The Sand Paper, the newsletter of the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association. If you meet a woman in Surprise Canyon who can name 40 different wildflowers, or a man in rapture over the strata of the Wind Canyon cliffs, you might mistake them for scientists. But in fact these are contemporary landscape artists Kirsten Anderson and Victor Schiro. Any wash or slot around Borrego these days is likely to harbor an artist. They’re part of the statewide revival of landscape painting, spurred in part by the renewed vigor…

The Desert Art Dynasty of John and Kathi Hilton

By Ann Japenga

The painter Kathi Hilton Garvin, art dealer Dan Rohlfing and I had just finished dinner at the 29 Palms Inn. The sky was turning pink then blue, like a Technicolor Hilton painting, when Dan suggested that we try to find John Hilton’s old 29 Palms homestead, playhouse to movie stars and desert artists. As we crammed into my Subaru, I wasn’t so sure about this plan. It was getting dark and no one really knew where we were going except that it was out in nowhere. Dan, co-owner of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery on the Sonoma coast, had never been…

Robert Arnett: The Original Wonder Valley Homesteader

By Ann Japenga

If you take the Hwy 62 Art Tour this weekend (Oct. 27-28, 2012), you’ll notice the ephemeral feeling in the air. So many LA artists have moved here in recent years. The studios feel like they might close up at any moment and return to abandoned homestead status. Not Bob Arnett’s place. When I wandered into his backyard on a recent visit, there were paintings stacked up everywhere, hung on the fences and leaning against an old swing set. I felt like I’d stumbled on the timeless heart of the overheated High Desert scene. One of the earliest artist-colonizers of…

Val Samuelson: The Bulldozing Modernist of Cat City

By Ann Japenga

Marian and Val Samuelson by Paul Pospesil

I arrived at an estate sale in the Cathedral City cove not long ago to find what looked like a line of leaf-cutter ants carrying away oversized objects. People balanced huge picture frames on their shoulders, floated them along like sails and strapped them to car roofs. The leaf-litter was the accumulated life’s work of artist Val Samuelson, a Cove dweller for 37 years. Today, not long after that inglorious event, Samuelson’s reputation is on the rise as the Cathedral City Public Arts Commission has launched an exhibit devoted to the longtime resident who died in 2000. Known for his…

James Toenjes: Painting the Cahuilla Landscape

By Ann Japenga

I first knew Jim Toenjes as an archaeologist who works closely with the eminent Cahuilla scholar Lowell Bean. One day I happened to glance in Jim’s car trunk and realized with a start he is an archaeologist who also has a trunk full of paintings. It took even longer before I understood the extent of it: This archaeologist is in fact one of the great unrecognized landscape painters of the Coachella Valley. My slow dawning is typical for those who meet Jim. Born in Nebraska in 1951, he’s a red-haired, loose-limbed modest soul–the kind of fellow who makes gingerbread when…

Ron Backer: Bringing Americana to a Stronghold of Modernism

By Ann Japenga

County Well on the Bradshaw Road in Indian Wells

Join me in saying Thanks to the state of South Dakota for sending Ronald Backer our way. It’s as if the Great Plains groomed this artist just for us–salting him with treks to Spirit Mound and seasoning him with the lore of Deadwood. They wrapped him in tradition and delivered him to Palm Desert with the specific task of bringing Americana to the Coachella Valley. The poor man doesn’t know what he’s up against. With metal sculptures in the medians, Chihuily glass anemones in the galleries and Donald Judd’s minimalist bunkers occupying the new museum—it’s clear that the modern rules…

Fred Grayson Sayre: Finding Light and Life on a Thermal Date Ranch

By Ann Japenga

While Barbara Harmon and her husband Cliff are being honored this season as pillars of the Taos arts community and the Taos Moderns, you can bet Barbara’s thoughts will sometimes drift to a different desert and another time. Barbara was just six weeks old in 1927 when she first rode out from Glendale to the Coachella Valley with her father Fred Grayson Sayre. Their destination was the Barker Ranch, home of Harmon’s mother Ruth. (Ruth’s family were pioneer date ranchers in the Valley since 1905.) The Sayres stayed in a cabin called the Paint Shack. Fred Sayre would roam out…

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Blog Archives

Stephen Willard’s Mammoth Lakes Gallery Reopening

The Smoketree Artists’ Historic Home Tour

Millicent Harvey: A Boston Transplant Befriends the Smoke Tree

The New Naturalists: Borrego Landscape Painters

The Desert Art Dynasty of John and Kathi Hilton

Robert Arnett: The Original Wonder Valley Homesteader

Val Samuelson: The Bulldozing Modernist of Cat City

James Toenjes: Painting the Cahuilla Landscape

Ron Backer: Bringing Americana to a Stronghold of Modernism

Fred Grayson Sayre: Finding Light and Life on a Thermal Date Ranch

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