Desert Artists

Norton Allen: Tracking the Elusive Mapmaker

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norton DV

Note: Through April 30, 2011, the Historical Society of Palm Desert presents the first contemporary display of Norton Allen’s work. Some 25 maps are on loan from book dealer William Dailey. Also on display are Norton Allen sketches and artifacts. www.HSPD.org My fascination with Norton Allen goes back to a hot day 15 years ago when I brought home a cardboard box of old Desert Magazines. The magazine, published from 1937 to 1985, offered an alternative to the Palm Springs of golf and martinis, introducing me instead to an appealing world of mirages, ghost towns and lost treasure. Then there…

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Marjorie’s View: Bringing Borrego Painters Home

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Marjorie's View, by Jeff Sewell

When Barbara Nickerson put an ad in the Borrego Sun looking for early Borrego desert paintings, she wound up filling in missing pieces of California art history. The Executive Director of the Borrego Art Institute, Nickerson appealed to local collectors who may have paintings of the area in their homes. Right away, the calls came in. “We are in the midst of a happening!” Nickerson reported soon after her notice appeared. “We’ve got three nice Bartkos, four or more Marjorie Reeds, one large Ivan Messenger…” The result: A solid first-ever exhibit of historic Borrego art displayed in downtown Borrego Springs…

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Tony Foster: Icebergs and Ocotillo

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Anza Borrego, courtesy of Tony Foster

Tony Foster lives in Cornwall, England, surrounded by the sea, and breaks for tea every two hours when he’s out painting. Can this man truly be called a desert artist? A Smoketree painter he is, for our purposes. Not only because he has painted Mt. San Jacinto from atop the Joshua Tree hills, but because he lives by the rules that governed the early desert painters: –Go on foot. –When you get there stay awhile. When I first saw a book of Tony Foster’s enormous watercolors (Painting At the Edge of the World) at a gallery in Santa Fe I…

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Eva Slater: The Death Valley Journey of a Modern Artist

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Desert Rain

Life in the Slater household in 1950s Orange County was like living in a mid-century modern postcard. John and Eva Slater and their kids, Dan and Miriam, lived in a custom-built A-frame house aligned with the North Star. John Slater worked as an inventor and chief scientist at Autonetics—what could be more Space Age? Eva Slater, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1922, was part of a cool modern art movement called Hard Edge. She and her artist friend Helen Lundeberg were both inspired by the geometry of the desert; both made trips to Death Valley and Palm Springs. Yet, only…

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Penelope Krebs: From LA Hard-Edge to Ornithological Art

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Cedar Waxwing on pomegranate branch

To be an abstract artist in LA in the 1980s was the next best thing to being lead singer in a punk band. You lived in a downtown LA loft and partied with celebrities.  Hard-edge artist Penelope Krebs enjoyed the perks of the scene for nearly 20 years until the death of her husband, fellow artist William Dwyer, in 2004. Then Krebs stopped painting her huge geometric canvases. The magic of all those lines and colors–the magic of the parties–was gone for her. Someone told her there were artists living near Joshua Tree National Park and she thought maybe she…

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Janet Morgan and Gregory Frux: Bringing Back Expedition Art

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Gregory Frux, Death Valley Badlands

Long before the first art gallery opened on El Paseo, US Army expedition artists of the 1800s sketched the desert on foot. Baldwin Mollhausen braved wolves, grizzlies and snowstorms to make the earliest sketches of the Needles area. For survey artists like Mollhausen tramping through the sands was an essential part of painting a picture. Today most landscape artists survey the terrain from a comfortable vehicle. However, some artists have returned to the original concept of art as a form of exploration, even risk-taking. The British artist Tony Foster, for instance, creates watercolor diaries of the world’s wild places while…

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Elaine Mathews: Master of Rock and Earth

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Near Thousand Palms Oasis

Hours before daylight, Elaine Mathews wakes up thinking of a palm tree or piece of sky she wants to work on. “I want to get started and I don’t want to wait,” she says. So while her husband, Steve, sleeps, she sneaks off to the garage studio she shares with a golf cart, a Honda, a leaf blower and other garden tools. She sets a timer, then for the next few hours she paints tirelessly, occasionally spritzing herself with a water bottle (the wall A-C unit can’t keep up with the 115 degree temps.) When the timer rings she might…

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An Appraiser Looks at Swinnerton

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AndersonShea_logo

Ed. Note:  Santa Barbara art historian, curator and appraiser Alissa J. Anderson has a special affinity for desert paintings. She grew up in Lake Arrowhead and made frequent trips to Palm Springs as a youth. “I love the austerity of the desert,” she says. “That atmosphere. That silence. I love Swinnerton in particular. He captures the same loneliness that Edward Hopper has in his cityscapes.” Many of Anderson’s clients, collectors of Western art, also pursue desert paintings.  In this article (it first appeared on Anderson’s blog), she appraises a Jimmy Swinnerton painting submitted by a reader. Swinnerton, a giant of…

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Cady Wells and the Desert Modern

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wells-Untitled300web

I’m no longer surprised when I hear about a hot Southwestern artist and then find he or she had ties to the Coachella Valley. In fact, I’ve come to expect those connections. The newest discovery is Henry Cady Wells, a modernist Santa Fe artist who lived in Palm Springs at one time. Georgia O’Keeffe once remarked that she and her friend Wells were the two best artists from their region. And while Wells has been relatively obscure till now, his day has come largely due to the efforts of Lois P. Rudnick, editor of a satisfying new book from the…

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Ralph Love and Roy Morrissey: The Art Shacks of Temecula

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Diablo Crossing, by Roy Morrissey

Update: Roy Morrissey died on July 7, 2011, in Hemet. The tourists called it Tee-mah-COOL-ya, if they called it anything at all. There were only a few hundred people in Temecula in the 1960s, but located as it was halfway between the art towns of Laguna Beach and Palm Springs it was perfectly situated for a mini art explosion of its own. Travelers on the old three-lane highway braked when they saw a sign on a roof that read “Art Shack”. The windows of the sagging structure were filled with paintings of smoke trees and canyons; the sweet sounds of…

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