With the desert strangely warm this season, the snakes have awakened early and artists from colder places are busy in the canyons. One such visitor, Randall David Tipton, is a spellbinding landscape painter well-known in Portland and the Northwest–but he…
Shari Elf, a well known member of the Joshua Tree art community, presents a short film about Western artist Don Shreves (1918-1997). Shari is working with Shreve’s 97-year-old brother, Rollie, to document Shreves’ life and work. Paralyzed due to a…
When you’re driving in from LA and hit Banning and the woolly San Gorgonio Pass, you’ve officially entered smoketree country. As Banning celebrates its 100th birthday this year, this atmospheric desert edge town is ramping up as a center for…
Bunnie Hamilton had operated her small gallery in Borrego Springs—the Galleria at the Palms at Indian Head–for less than a year when a jaw-dropping collection of desert art fell in her lap. An unnamed collector gave her his comprehensive collection—65…
Arizona’s Pioneering Women Artists To explore the edges of California desert art, you sometimes have to leave the state. After all, the artists who painted Mt. San Jacinto didn’t pay much allegiance to state lines and many wandered over into…
October 27-28, 2012, Weekend Two of the Hwy 62 Art Tours, is your chance to visit the backroad studios of dozens of high-desert artists in the Morongo Valley, Joshua Tree and beyond. You’ll have to search out the landscape artists…
The Smoketree School is indebted to San Diego for the landscape painters who wandered through Ramona and Julian all the way to the desert country. Two current exhibits at the San Diego History Center offer a chance to get acquainted…
With Desertscapes behind us for another year, the theme of desert-influenced art continues in these exhibits locally and elsewhere in the West. Sacred Places—Watercolour Diaries from the American Southwest opens May 18, 2012 (through July 14) at Gerald Peters Gallery…
March and April 2012 are packed with desert art events crowned by Desertscapes, the third annual Valleywide celebration of desert art. Participants include the City of Palm Desert, the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts at College of the…
The Smoketree School abounds with colorful geniuses but we have not been able to claim an aristocratic all-star equivalent to a Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt. Thanks to the Palm Springs Art Museum and Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara,…
