March 7, 2019–When I last wrote about Desert X it was to warn you that the art carnival might be coming for your mountain. Little did I know they were coming for mine–the inviolate north face of Mt. San Jacinto.…
February 1, 2019–In the next few weeks, desert art will have a moment. We’ll be gracing the pages of major magazines and newspapers around the world: Vogue, Architectural Digest, W Magazine. If the 2017 coverage is any gauge, the 2019…
In the last couple of years I’ve feasted endlessly on 2,000 historic photos of the unexplored desert east of the Salton Sea. Taken by 1930s Mecca postmaster Susie Keef Smith and her cousin Lula Mae Graves, the collection offers an…
December 10, 2018–Jeff Lapides was laying out pages for historian John Robinson’s final book when he noticed some very old photos by a man with a fancy name: Rudolph d’Heureuse. “I thought who the heck was this French guy and…
When a cowboy starts collecting Western art, you’d expect to see a lot of horses and saddles. That’s not true for Utah rancher George Wanlass. As he amassed art for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, he was drawn…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
