Desert Artists

Gunnar Widforss: Painter of the National Parks Joins the Smoketree School

Gunnar Widforss, Desert Palms With Mountains. Courtesy Biltmore Galleries.

Ed. note: Desert artist, museum curator and former Colorado river guide Alan Petersen is seeking work by Gunnar Widforss for a new book. Please see the end of his article for details and a link to Alan’s own work. Swedish-American watercolor artist Gunnar Widforss (1879 – 1934) worked in the California desert around Palm Springs and in the Coachella Valley from 1922 through 1933. Widforss arrived in the United States from Sweden in January 1921. By that time he had made a career and established himself as a well-respected painter in Europe. There he had focused his activity along the…

Four Days, Fifteen Artists, Death Valley

By Jim Trolinger

In March, 2012, after 40 years of enjoying visits and painting Death Valley, I brought in reinforcements in the form of eight artist friends to help me capture the beauty of this magical place. The paint-out led me to publish Painting Death Valley to inspire other artists to take up the challenge. The outcome was so rewarding that a return in March 2013 was virtually a no-brainer. I returned this time with 12 friends and two photographers to document the event. The new book, Painting in Death Valley Again (excerpts below) complements the first and is largely about the artists…

Stephen Willard’s Mammoth Lakes Gallery Reopening

By Ann Japenga

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…

Grace Hall Hemingway’s Painting Tour of the Southwest

By John E. Sanford

Ed. Note: In a coup for the Smoketree School, we’ve discovered that Grace Hall Hemingway, mother of Ernest, painted scenes around the Imperial Valley, Death Valley and the Coachella Valley. Here her grandson, John E. Sanford, looks at Grace’s late-in-life painting career. In Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway reveals himself to be as much an aficionado of painting as he had been of bullfighting and hunting. At least twenty painter’s names are sprinkled throughout the text from Bosch to Toulouse-Lautrec. It is no surprise that Thomas Hudson, the protagonist of Islands, is a painter. Also a painter was Ernest’s…

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…

Sharing Death Valley with Artist Friends

By Jim Trolinger

Ed. note: Jim Trolinger’s new book Painting in Death Valley is a must for desert artists and their fans. See ordering info at the end of the article. After 40 years of visiting and painting Death Valley I still enjoy returning to this magnificent place. Boasting over three million acres and 130 miles long, it is the largest National Park in the contiguous USA. Amazingly, in all those visits I have never encountered other artists. A Google search for Death Valley artists turns up a meager two or three, even though the park service offers an artist-in-residence program. The Fall…

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…

Shirley Burman and Richard Steinheimer: A Desert Date on “Mars”

By Shirley Burman Steinheimer

It turns out to be me or at least my shadow.

Ed. Note: California Desert Art is honored to present one of the great untold romances of the desert. Staged in a crater near Amboy, Shirley Burman Steinheimer’s story tells of her first desert date with Richard Steinheimer. Her late husband was one of the legendary railroad photographers of all time and is often called the Ansel Adams of Railroad Photography. Shirley is also an accomplished railroad photographer and has advanced the story of women in railroading through her research and writing. Folks are drawn to the desert for many reasons — study nature, employed by the State or Federal Parks…

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Desert Artists

Gunnar Widforss: Painter of the National Parks Joins the Smoketree School

Four Days, Fifteen Artists, Death Valley

Stephen Willard’s Mammoth Lakes Gallery Reopening

Grace Hall Hemingway’s Painting Tour of the Southwest

The Smoketree Artists’ Historic Home Tour

Millicent Harvey: A Boston Transplant Befriends the Smoke Tree

Sharing Death Valley with Artist Friends

The New Naturalists: Borrego Landscape Painters

The Desert Art Dynasty of John and Kathi Hilton

Shirley Burman and Richard Steinheimer: A Desert Date on “Mars”

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