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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
California is a vast and picturesque region with a great variety of landscape. From the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the dazzling beaches and coves of the coast; from the flower-covered hills and secluded tree-lined valleys to…
