Blog Archives

Eric Merrell: Bringing the California Desert to NYC

By
spaceship-landing_s

Most Manhattan gallery-goers don’t know the names Jimmy Swinnerton or John Hilton; they can’t tell a smoketree from a cholla. While desert art is expanding its geographic appeal, it hasn’t reached the east coast yet. That transcontinental link may finally be forged, though, with Eric Merrell’s show “No Man is an Island”, opening July 14th at the Forbes Gallery in the lobby of Forbes Magazine headquarters in New York City. The exhibit is a collection of Merrell’s paintings made during an artist’s residency at Joshua Tree National Park in 2009. Will east coast viewers take to the yuccas and boulders?…

Read more »

Elsie’s Army, Clonard Thomas, Pelton Mystery and More

By
Elsie’s Army, Clonard Thomas, Pelton Mystery and More

For every desert painter found in books, hundreds more were faithful to the terrain–but are not so well-known as yet. Two such devoted desert painters passed away recently. Clonard Bunn Thomas of Palm Desert died February 10, 2013. With her artist husband Bruce she managed the Aerie Art Garden, a 20 acre retreat in the Cahuilla Hills. Thomas painted with the Coachella Valley Watercolor Society’s “Field Mice” and rendered the local landscape with intensity and openness to abstraction. For painting tips from Clonard and Bruce Thomas, see: http://www.aerieartgarden.com/artistcorner3.html Elsie Grace, 91, died on February 15, 2013.  She taught watercolor at…

Read more »

Early Desert Stash in Borrego, Terry Masters’ Grand Opening, California Watercolors in Pasadena

By
Early Desert Stash in Borrego, Terry Masters’ Grand Opening, California Watercolors in Pasadena

Bunnie Hamilton had operated her small gallery in Borrego Springs—the Galleria at the Palms at Indian Head–for less than a year when a jaw-dropping collection of desert art fell in her lap. An unnamed collector gave her his comprehensive collection—65 ocotillos, yuccas, smoke trees and dunescapes– by big name desert artists to be sold at auction prices. The all-star team includes John Hilton, Jimmy Swinnerton, Fred Chisnall, Wilton McCoy, Charles Fries, Paul Grimm, Sam Hyde Harris, Darwin Duncan, George Bickerstaff, William Darling, Joane Cromwell and others. A few contemporary artists are included, and there are some seascapes amidst the many…

Read more »

Visit Agnes Pelton Home, Become a Desert Painter, Appraisal Day in Palm Desert

By
Visit Agnes Pelton Home, Become a Desert Painter, Appraisal Day in Palm Desert

Get a look at Agnes Pelton’s former home this Sunday, February 10, 2013, on the Cathedral City Historical Society’s Home Tour of Working Artists. The tour spotlights the homes and studios of artists working in the Cathedral City Cove, including photographer Peter Palladino and choreographer and dancer Simeon Den, owners of the Pelton house. The couple is maintaining Pelton’s home—where she painted her most transcendent works–as a shrine to the desert painter. You can see the exterior, at least, on Sunday and see the rest of the home during a major Agnes Pelton celebration April 6th and 7th. Sunday’s home…

Read more »

Women Artists in Flagstaff, Mystery Painting, Paul Landacre, Desertscapes

By
Women Artists in Flagstaff, Mystery Painting, Paul Landacre, Desertscapes

Arizona’s Pioneering Women Artists To explore the edges of California desert art, you sometimes have to leave the state. After all, the artists who painted Mt. San Jacinto didn’t pay much allegiance to state lines and many wandered over into Arizona. Arizona’s Pioneering Women Artists at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff (now through May 12, 2013) introduces ten women who roamed the West from 1905-1940. Among them: Lillian Wilhelm Smith, illustrator of Zane Grey novels, and our own stagecoach artist Marjorie Reed. Exhibit collaborators Lonnie Pierson Dunbier, Betsy Fahlman and Fran Elliott have done tireless detective work to…

Read more »

Terry Masters’ New Gallery, Mark Kerckhoff Classes, Desert Art Center Lectures

By
Terry Masters, Moonlit Path to Tahquitz

UPDATE: This just in from Terry: “I’m now open Thur-Sun noon to 8pm at least and the doors are usually open when I’m working in the space. Please come by soon. The new studio # is 778-8855.” I’ve been lurking around the original Las Casuelas restaurant on South Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs. Peeking in windows and pacing the sidewalk, I may look suspicious–but really it’s for a good reason. The desert’s elusive master painter, aptly named Terry Masters, is opening a new desert art gallery at 370 N. Palm Canyon, next door to the popular Mexican café. In…

Read more »

Morongo Art Tours, the Desert Van Gogh and more

By
hwy 62 logo 2

October 27-28, 2012, Weekend Two of the Hwy 62 Art Tours, is your chance to visit the backroad studios of dozens of high-desert artists in the Morongo Valley, Joshua Tree and beyond. You’ll have to search out the landscape artists amidst all the potters, jewelers and performance artists, but the landscape here is always the main attraction—along with the earthy ambience that stands in refreshing contrast to everything Palm Springs. Look for the Wonder Valley studio of Robert Arnett (see an article on Arnett on California Desert Art soon), one of the early colonizers of the remote area; and don’t…

Read more »

San Diego Landscapes, Desert Art Center, Joshua Tree Classes, David Greene

By
Charles Reiffel, Road in the Cuyamacas

The Smoketree School is indebted to San Diego for the landscape painters who wandered through Ramona and Julian all the way to the desert country.  Two current exhibits at the San Diego History Center offer a chance to get acquainted with our shared heritage. In Landscapes Rediscovered: Depression-era San Diego Paintings, work unseen for 70 years is now on display. While in the collection of the San Diego Unified School District, the paintings had been dinged and exposed to the elements. With all their blemishes, works by artists such as Charles Reiffel and Maurice Braun (both painted the desert) are…

Read more »

Kathi Hilton, Daughter of Smoketree Legend John Hilton, Visits 29 Palms

By
JohnHilton and Kathi Hilton. Courtesy of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery.

A man of appetite and energy, John Hilton had an outsized persona and knew how to use it. He is arguably the most famous name in the Smoketree School, not for his paintings alone but for showing the others how to act like a desert artist. The man is so legendary as to be nearly untouchable, but now you have a chance to come closer via his daughter, desert painter Kathi Hilton Garvin. A show of Kathi’s work opens on Sunday, September 2, 2012 at the 29 Palms Art Gallery. The artist is traveling from her home in Utah for…

Read more »

Home of the Smoketree School Threatened

By
The regulars at the Desert Magazine gallery, by German artist L. Wertz. Courtesy of Anne Shelton.

The Smoketree School of desert art enjoyed its greatest flowering at the Desert Magazine art gallery on Highway 111 in Palm Desert. While the gallery is long gone, the building (it most recently housed LG’s Steakhouse) has looked much the same all these years. It’s a highly visible shrine to artists such as Jimmy Swinnerton, Olaf Wieghorst, Brownell McGrew, Bill Bender and many others. Now the shrine is threatened with defacement. The owner, San Diego developer Sam Rasmussen, appeared before the Palm Desert architectural review committee on July 10, 2012. The City approved his plan for a modernized facade for the building.…

Read more »


Read All News

The Latest News