Blog Archives

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

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…

Rare Agnes Pelton Abstract Saved From Junkheap

By Ann Japenga

I was exiting the rotunda of Cathedral City Hall after a talk by Agnes Pelton scholar Michael Zakian. He had just finished saying that Pelton’s abstracts are rare and becoming more and more valuable. “We think we might have found a new one today,” he added. I was thinking about that comment when I spotted a tanned, athletic-looking woman carrying a cardboard box, about the dimensions of a painting. On a hunch I asked what was in the box. Glenda Rice opened the flaps and slowly extracted a pale, quivering beauty of a painting: The newly-found Pelton abstract. The story…

Patricia Schaefer: Modern Desert Soul

By Ann Japenga

My new culture heroes are painters who defy the art school injunction against old-fashioned landscape painting and simply walk outside with a paintbrush. You can meet one such rebel, Patricia Schaefer, tonight (Friday, April 27, 2012) at the opening of her exhibit at Korakia Pensione in Palm Springs. Schaefer was previously known for her scenes of lawnmowers, motel pools and other modernist symbols of urban discontent. But hanging around the desert and hiking its trails made her want to sample an older way. When she first wandered out to try plein air painting she faced a considerable frustration curve. Her…

Street Art Meets Desert Art

By Ann Japenga

In desert art circles, the name Kevin Stewart equals respectability. The art appraiser and dealer is known for his impeccably pressed pinstripe shirts and his encyclopedic knowledge of desert art. You could take the man anywhere. So what was he doing out in front of his Palm Springs gallery on Friday, with hip-hop music blaring, urban youth milling about, and a long-haired young man on a ladder spray-painting a woman’s face on the side of his building? In a clattering collision of universes, Kevin Stewart–the dean of desert art dealers—has just become the father of Palm Springs Street Art. A…

The Artist as Collector: A Tour of the Lou Armentrout and Mick Welch Collection

By Ann Japenga

John Anthony Conner, the Road to Palm Springs

The love of terrain (common to landscape painters and collectors of desert art) starts in childhood. In my case, ditching high school in the hills of the San Gabriel Valley imprinted me with an ardor for dry ranges. I don’t know if Lou Armentrout and Mick Welch also ditched school, but like me they came to love the land early. In their case: the marshes and fields of Ohio where they both played as boys, and where both later taught school for 30 years. Their childhood attachment to a particular landscape led to a fascination with paintings of the Ohio…

Death Valley Children’s Book Animates the Arroyos

By Ann Japenga

On April 3rd 2012, at Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley, artist Janet Morgan unveils her new book on the park, along with a month-long exhibition of paintings by Janet and her husband, Gregory Frux. Morgan was already on the leading edge of landscape art in her role—shared with Greg—as an adventure artist. Together the two have traipsed Peru, Patagonia, Antarctica and remote California deserts in the style of early expedition artists. Now the three-time Death Valley artist-in-residence leads the way again in her children’s book Welcome to Death Valley. As two ravens, Ravenna and Ramón, explore the desert…

Francis Di Fronzo’s Desert of Memory

By Ann Japenga

I think of El Paseo art galleries as places people go to decorate the walls of their luxury homes. Having no luxury home (maybe my Dinah Shore-style pad was luxurious when it was first built 50 years ago), I rarely walk this gallery-rich stretch of Palm Desert. However, I escorted out-of-town visitors there recently and was arrested by a painting of a train in the empty desert. I am enamored of trains these days because of my friend Carl Bray, the artist and railroadman, who died recently. But there was something about this particular train on a wall of the…

David Greene: Mojave Noir

By Ann Japenga

Moving from Ohio to the alien landscape of Wonder Valley, David Greene encountered many wonders—not the least being the desert night. Greene had been working in a toilet factory in Ohio (hand-painting ceramic bath ware), and had never traveled east of St. Louis until friends moved to 29 Palms. He and his artist wife, Lorelei, decided to follow, settling in the hipster outpost east of Joshua Tree in 2005. Back in the Ohio metro area, the night did not entice. There, street lighting obliterated the starlight and moonlight. But in his new home, Greene would walk out after dark and…

Agnes Pelton Revival in Cathedral City

By Ann Japenga

The backyard of Agnes Pelton's house with a view of Mt. san Jacinto. (She didn't have apool) Photo by Christy Porter.

The first-annual Agnes Pelton Birthday Tea–on August 22, 2011–was hosted by Peter Palladino and Simeon Den, the new owners of Pelton’s former home in Cathedral City. Though Pelton died in 1961, her presence at the gathering was as strong as if she had just gone out for ice cubes. The event marks a hometown revival for the artist. For years the city paid little notice that one of the West’s most visionary artists spent her working days here. Recently there’s a growing awareness that Pelton is as important to Cathedral City as Georgia O’Keeffe to Abiquiu. A transcendental artist who…

Ginger Renner: Mother-Muse of Desert Painters

By Ann Japenga

For R. Brownell McGrew’s first ever one-man show in 1967, Ginger Renner packed nearly 1000 guests into her Desert Southwest Art Gallery in Palm Desert. The crowd spilled onto the then-deserted Highway 111, high on art and the owner’s infamous Fish House Punch. “You mix a goodly amount of fresh squeezed lime juice, Chablis, syrup and a pint of cheap brandy,” Renner explained. “You let that mellow and pour it quart for quart with champagne. It sure sold a lot of artwork.” Renner, who died on March 27, 2011 at age 89, was a PTA mom from Riverside who transformed…

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

Rare Agnes Pelton Abstract Saved From Junkheap

Patricia Schaefer: Modern Desert Soul

Street Art Meets Desert Art

The Artist as Collector: A Tour of the Lou Armentrout and Mick Welch Collection

Death Valley Children’s Book Animates the Arroyos

Francis Di Fronzo’s Desert of Memory

David Greene: Mojave Noir

Agnes Pelton Revival in Cathedral City

Ginger Renner: Mother-Muse of Desert Painters

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