The 22-year-old traveling the stagecoach road from San Diego into the backcountry seemed destined to be a lady. Born Hazel Marguerite Finch, she was trained in piano and art in South Pasadena schools and was on her way to a…
In a classic Sharon Bronzan painting you find a woman alone in a wilderness booby-trapped with daggered cactuses. She doesn’t look away but stares unflinchingly into danger. When she relaxes her hold on strict logic, her life-saving guardians appear: a…
Editor’s note: Agnes Pelton would have been pleased by the mass adulation coming her way. But she would be just as delighted by the personal tales that are cropping up. Pelton’s paintings seem to accompany select people in their lives,…
With so many international artists now sampling desert themes, it’s refreshing to meet a painter who is not a tourist but is genetically rooted in this place. Via his grandparents, Warner Graves III is connected to many epochal events in…
Editor’s note: Many people paint the desert but only a few embody the ur-qualities of the early desert artists. Jane Culp is one. She lives in an off-grid straw bale cabin perched above the Anza-Borrego desert. From this solitary outlook,…
Nature’s Secrets, a large desert landscape painting by Joshua Lawrence Meador, hung prominently in every home my mother lived in. My parents purchased it in 1963 as the centerpiece of our living room. They were told Nature’s Secrets was painted…
The first-annual Agnes Pelton Birthday Tea–on August 22, 2011–was hosted by Peter Palladino and Simeon Den, the new owners of Pelton’s former home in Cathedral City. Though Pelton died in 1961, her presence at the gathering was as strong as…
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…
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…
