Desert Artists

King of Bohemia: Sadakichi Hartmann in the San Gorgonio Pass

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Editor’s note–To those who remember him when he lived on the Morongo Reservation in the 1930s, Sadakichi Hartmann was a tattered, scrawny asthmatic who passed his days painting his cherished Mt. San Jacinto. To old friends like Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Alfred Stieglitz, he was the King of Bohemia–an influential modernist art critic, artist and poet. Banning historian Bill Bell has spent years researching Sadakichi, one of the most important overlooked historical figures of our region. Here is Part Two of his Three Part article. “Like a snow ghost in feathery flight” Sadakichi Hartmann floated in and out of…

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Hazel’s Garden: Outsider Art Discovered in Wonder Valley

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Despite its current popularity with fashion photographers, Wonder Valley can feel godforsaken on a hot summer day. It was just such a day when Joe Barrett huddled beneath a shade canopy and sent his drone into the sky to take photos of an abandoned five-acre homestead. The original shack was busted up; no one had lived there for decades. But a neighbor had noticed–while browsing Google Earth–that there appeared to be rows of stones arranged to form words. Big words. They were hard to make out from the ground so Barrett and his drone were enlisted to see what was…

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Unexpected Beauty: Robert Cole Caples’ Nevada

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Sixteen-year-old Robert Cole Caples left New York City for the West in 1924, landing in the Great Basin desert of Nevada. When the boy got his first look at Pyramid Lake, his future as Nevada’s leading artist of the 20th Century was cinched. “Such unexpected beauty really hurt,” he said. “It was like being struck with the sky.” Like Agnes Pelton, Caples sought the essence of landscape, or what he called “the great dance going on behind the mask of things.” Completing his initiation as a desert painter, he eventually declared his devotion to one beloved place. Pyramid Lake became…

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Jim Trolinger and the Magnificent Six: Showdown at Joshua Tree

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Ed. note: In the grand tradition of early desert painters, Jim Trolinger sees plein air painting as a team sport. We previously posted Jim’s tale of his group’s Death Valley expedition. In his latest account, the optical physicist and his merry band of painters take on Joshua Tree. In February 2018, the Magnificent Six+ returned to Joshua Tree National Park for yet another desert paint out. Jim Trolinger, Pauline Abbott, Zeke Guspan, Geoffrey Winnie, Steven Seizo Nakamura, and Jesse Fortune are the original Magnificent Six and the plus comprises artist friends who join in various outings; this paint out included…

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Desert Devotional: The Anza-Borrego Paintings of Jane Culp

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Desert Devotional: The Anza-Borrego Paintings of Jane Culp

Editor’s note: Many people paint the desert but only a few embody the ur-qualities of the early desert artists. Jane Culp is one. She lives in an off-grid straw bale cabin perched above the Anza-Borrego desert. From this solitary outlook, she observes–and participates in–the natural forces that pulverize granite and push tectonic plates.    Her life is a veritable how-to manual for desert artists and mystics, linking her to greats like Agnes Pelton and Carl Eytel, who lived a monastic life in the rocks above today’s Palm Springs Tennis Club. We’ll have more on Culp and her upcoming exhibit–Predator Country–at…

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Collecting Arizona: How Gary Fillmore and David Picerne Tracked Down the State’s Greatest Paintings

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David Picerne, a real estate developer, and Gary Fillmore, an art appraiser and owner of the Blue Coyote Gallery, went on a hunt to find the state’s very best landscape art, seeking out offerings from the Taos artists, Santa Fe railroad artists, California Impressionists and our own Smoketree Painters. Currently on view in Wickenburg (through March 4, 2018) is their comprehensive display of landscape art from around Arizona. There is plenty of overlap between the California desert and Arizona artists. To understand the Mecca Mud Hills…you have to be versed in the Superstitions, as well. Gary Fillmore knows both. He has…

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Harry and the Giants: The Geoglyph Photographs of Harry Casey

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Harry and the Giants: The Geoglyph Photographs of Harry Casey

Editor’s note—One morning in the 1980s when I was working as an LA Times reporter, I hopped in an airplane with archaeologist Jay von Werlhof and pilot Harry Casey. Flying out of Brawley, we cruised low over a sandy expanse in search of the original desert art. Casey, an Imperial Valley farmer, steered us over cliffs beside the Colorado River and soon we saw below us a giant human figure with his legs cut off from view, as if he was tumbling into the river. This was my first glimpse of the massive ground drawings known as intaglios, geoglyphs or…

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Out of the Desert: Internment Camp Art Discovered in Banning

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Editor’s note: Banning historian Bill Bell recently unearthed a rare trove of art inspired by exile. The hand-stitched scrapbook–poems, essays and linoleum prints–was made by high school students interned at the Poston Relocation Camp, three miles from the Arizona side of the Colorado River and north of Blythe. The internationally acclaimed sculptor Isamu Noguchi voluntarily moved to the camp in 1942 and may have helped to instruct the young artists. The scrapbook is discussed here by the man who found it.    While sorting through decades of donated items to the Banning Public Library I recently found a scrapbook from…

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Victory Ride: The Memoirs of 29 Palms Artist Chuck Caplinger

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Editor’s note–Chuck Caplinger, a leader in the 29 Palms arts scene, recently published his life story. An Artist’s Journey: Memoirs of the Creative Life of Artist Chuck Caplinger follows Chuck from his childhood in Pasadena, Texas, through his tenure as a NASA artist, then on to painting custom vans and film posters in Hollywood. It culminates in the momentous Harley ride that led him to Twentynine Palms and his current incarnation as a desert and wildlife painter. In the chapter excerpted here, the artist nicknamed Cowboy is commissioned to paint a Desert Storm Victory Parade mural in 29 Palms. The…

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Radical Cartography: Obi Kaufmann and The California Field Atlas

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There’s a new name in the pantheon of mapmaker artists. Joining a distinguished line-up that includes Desert magazine’s Norton Allen, Obi Kaufmann is a poet-artist-adventurer who set out to inhale the entire state of California by hiking, camping, dreaming, painting and drawing maps. His mammoth compendium, The California Field Atlas (released this month from Heyday books), combines more than 300 hand-painted maps with watercolor paintings of mountains and wildlife. Obi will be signing books at the Borrego Art Institute on September 14th, 2017. His artwork from the chapter Of Life, Death and the Desert will be on display at the gallery…

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