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…
Category: Featured
The Desert Art Dynasty of John and Kathi Hilton
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…
Shirley Burman and Richard Steinheimer: A Desert Date on “Mars”
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…
Robert Arnett: The Original Wonder Valley Homesteader
If you take the Hwy 62 Art Tour this weekend (Oct. 27-28, 2012), you’ll notice the ephemeral feeling in the air. So many LA artists have moved here in recent years. The studios feel like they might close up at…
Val Samuelson: The Bulldozing Modernist of Cat City
I arrived at an estate sale in the Cathedral City Cove not long ago to find what looked like a line of leaf-cutter ants carrying away oversized objects. People balanced huge picture frames on their shoulders, floated them along like…
James Toenjes: Painting the Cahuilla Landscape
I first knew Jim Toenjes as an archaeologist who works closely with the eminent Cahuilla scholar Lowell Bean. One day I happened to glance in Jim’s car trunk and realized with a start he is an archaeologist who also has…
Ron Backer: Bringing Americana to a Stronghold of Modernism
Join me in saying Thanks to the state of South Dakota for sending Ronald Backer our way. It’s as if the Great Plains groomed this artist just for us–salting him with treks to Spirit Mound and seasoning him with the…
Jimmy Swinnerton and Bill Bender in Monument Valley
Ed. Note: Gary Fillmore’s’ new book Shadows on the Mesa explores the interactions of artists who visited the Wetherill-Colville Guest Ranch in Arizona in the early 1900s. Among them are painters who also worked in the Coachella Valley: Clyde Forsythe,…
Fred Grayson Sayre: Finding Light and Life on a Thermal Date Ranch
While Barbara Harmon and her husband Cliff are being honored this season as pillars of the Taos arts community and the Taos Moderns, you can bet Barbara’s thoughts will sometimes drift to a different desert and another time. Barbara was…
Rare Agnes Pelton Abstract Saved From Junkheap
I was exiting the rotunda of Cathedral City Hall after a talk by Agnes Pelton scholar Michael Zakian. He had just finished saying that Pelton’s abstracts are rare and becoming more and more valuable. “We think we might have found…