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…
Art and Theosophy at Lomaland You don’t have to labor through Helena Blavatsky’s tomes to get a taste for Theosophy, an esoteric belief system that inspired Agnes Pelton and so many others. The teachings are notoriously opaque to modern minds,…
Life in the Slater household in 1950s Orange County was like living in a mid-century modern postcard. John and Eva Slater and their kids, Dan and Miriam, lived in a custom-built A-frame house aligned with the North Star. John Slater…
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…
Long before the first art gallery opened on El Paseo, US Army expedition artists of the 1800s sketched the desert on foot. Baldwin Mollhausen braved wolves, grizzlies and snowstorms to make the earliest sketches of the Needles area. For survey…
Hours before daylight, Elaine Mathews wakes up thinking of a palm tree or piece of sky she wants to work on. “I want to get started and I don’t want to wait,” she says. So while her husband, Steve, sleeps,…
