Editor’s note: In the early days of desert painting, Palm Springs was a tiny outpost in the wilderness and artists roamed the dunes like nomadic prophets. Among the top-tier artists here around 1920 were the three friends Guy Rose, Alson…
This article first appeared in the Early Spring, 2014, edition of The Sand Paper, the newsletter of the Anza Borrego Desert Natural History Association (www.abdnha.org). Faced with a field of spring flowers, some of us want to run the other…
Mystical transformations famously take place in a single moment. One minute you’re ordinary and the next “the great door, that does not look like a door, opens,” in the words of Stephen Graham. That’s pretty much what happened to Erin…
Ed. Note: Rita Collier shares her intrepid hunt for facts about her grandfather, a desert painter of the 1920s and 30s. While not all quests are this fruitful, Collier’s tale shows what can happen when you start looking. In the…
I was walking through the library at Idyllwild Arts Academy one day when my attention was grabbed by hunks of color in the shape of a familiar local landmark: Suicide Rock. The colors were almost cartoonish, but the painting drew…
Transcendent artists such as Agnes Pelton aimed to capture the forces underlying desert mountains and dunes. One of the boldest artists working in the same vein today is Brooklyn-based Janet Morgan. Along with her artist-partner Gregory Frux, she has explored…
Here are more rarely seen images from Carl Bray’s life, courtesy of his son, Patrick Bray. An exhibit of Carl’s final paintings just opened at the The Historical Society of Palm Desert. The opening reception is Saturday, October 5, 2013,…
The Historical Society of Palm Desert is opening an exhibit of Carl Bray’s last paintings, along with a display of memorabilia from his studio loaned by the Indian Wells Historic Preservation Foundation. The opening reception is Saturday, October 5, 2013,…
The secret to Burt Procter’s distinctive style might have vanished with him except that his daughter, Ginny Bohannan, has now shared an early video of her father teaching his technique. Aspiring desert artists can watch as the cowboy modernist demonstrates…
Up on Miracle Hill in Desert Hot Springs, the pueblo-builder and snake-tender Cabot Yerxa took painting lessons from his neighbor, Burt Procter, while Procter’s young daughter Ginny played on a packed dirt floor, sprinkled down with water to keep it…
