It was 2010, in Terry Masters’ painting class at Palm Springs’ Desert Art Center. Terry walked to the front of the room and hoisted a large canvas onto an easel. He flipped open his portable plein air kit (battle-scarred from hundreds…
I think of El Paseo art galleries as places people go to decorate the walls of their luxury homes. Having no luxury home (maybe my Dinah Shore-style pad was luxurious when it was first built 50 years ago), I rarely…
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…
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…
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…
When a fox named Fresno encounters three border-crossing foxes from Mexico, they all wind up partying at a palm oasis–in a series of enchanting illustrations by British-born artist Anthony W. Parr. “A fox knows no borders, just how to have…
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…
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…
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…
