Sixteen-year-old Robert Cole Caples left New York City for the West in 1924, landing in the Great Basin desert of Nevada. When the boy got his first look at Pyramid Lake, his future as Nevada’s leading artist of the 20th…
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…
Ed. note: In the grand tradition of early desert painters, Jim Trolinger sees plein air painting as a team sport. We previously posted Jim’s tale of his group’s Death Valley expedition. In his latest account, the optical physicist and his…
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,…
David Picerne, a real estate developer, and Gary Fillmore, an art appraiser and owner of the Blue Coyote Gallery, went on a hunt to find the state’s very best landscape art, seeking out offerings from the Taos artists, Santa Fe…
Editor’s note—One morning in the 1980s when I was working as an LA Times reporter, I hopped in an airplane with archaeologist Jay von Werlhof and pilot Harry Casey. Flying out of Brawley, we cruised low over a sandy expanse…
