For R. Brownell McGrew’s first ever one-man show in 1967, Ginger Renner packed nearly 1000 guests into her Desert Southwest Art Gallery in Palm Desert. The crowd spilled onto the then-deserted Highway 111, high on art and the owner’s infamous…
Category: Featured
Glenda Nordmeyer: Stone Diaries
Since founding this website I can now attest: The world is not really going to Twitter. People are still going deeper and deeper into the land, abandoning their glowing screens to seek beauty. The ranks of contemporary desert painters are…
Smoketree Trio: New Books on Desert Artists
Scholarship on The Smoketree School made big strides in the spring of 2011 with the release of three new books covering unexplored corners of desert art. California Art Club California Light: A Century of Landscapes is the long-anticipated history of…
Norton Allen: Tracking the Elusive Mapmaker
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…
Marjorie’s View: Bringing Borrego Painters Home
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: Icebergs and Ocotillo
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…
Eva Slater: The Death Valley Journey of a Modern Artist
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…
Penelope Krebs: From LA Hard-Edge to Ornithological Art
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…
Janet Morgan and Gregory Frux: Bringing Back Expedition Art
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…
Elaine Mathews: Master of Rock and Earth
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,…