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…
A man of appetite and energy, John Hilton had an outsized persona and knew how to use it. He is arguably the most famous name in the Smoketree School, not for his paintings alone but for showing the others how…
The Smoketree School of desert art enjoyed its greatest flowering at the Desert Magazine art gallery on Highway 111 in Palm Desert. While the gallery is long gone, the building (it most recently housed LG’s Steakhouse) has looked much the…
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…
The former Borrego Valley Foods store, a mid-century modern building prominently located on Christmas Circle in Borrego Springs, has been purchased by the Borrego Art Institute for a new gallery featuring plein air desert artists. With Borrego’s vast desert wilderness,…
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…
Terry Masters is the most respected name in desert art, but it’s not always easy to locate either the man or his work. While other artists rush to openings or mingle over martinis, he’s likely to be off alone painting…
The Agnes Pelton hometown revival gathers steam in 2012 with several big events honoring the Mystic Genius of Cat City. Sunday, January 22—Nancy Strow Sheley presents a talk on Pelton at the Cathedral City Historical Society. An associate professor of…
There is nothing like a train to accent the space and scale of the desert. The two go together just about as well as deserts and smoketrees. One man who knew this perhaps better than anyone was Richard Steinheimer, one…
The free monthly paint-outs of the Desert Art Center are reason enough to become a desert painter if you aren’t one already. You’ll go to beautiful places, stand around and draw smoketrees, palaver with others as much or as little…
