Famous desert landscape paintings8/12/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() There was even an outpost in Cathedral City where Pelton lived. Established in 1950, with the help of Gordon Coutts’ daughter Jeanne, the center hosted art shows, featured art classes and published souvenir books promoting the desert and artists alike. Now famous, she was a pioneer who graciously donated a painting of a smoke tree to raise funds to start the Desert Art Center. Pelton worked in oil and pastel and her early figurative work was overtaken later with dreamscapes and abstracts with soft desert light. Pelton’s paintings bring hundreds of thousands of dollars today, and she is often compared to Georgia O’Keefe as an early pioneering female artist. He spent the rest of his life in Palm Springs, entertaining many visiting artists and dignitaries including Churchill.Īnd there was Agnes Pelton. Traveling to California for a tour, he decided not to return to Tangiers, but instead build a Moorish house on the desert here, which was suffused with the same unusual golden light of North Africa. Museums in all these places have his canvases. He lived in Australia and Tangiers for long periods. Born in Scotland, he studied in London and Paris. ![]() Winston Churchill came to paint at Gordon Coutts’ Dar Marroc (now the Korakia Pensione.) Coutts was quite famous in England, Australia and Morocco before settling in Palm Springs. Carl Bray’s modest board and batten house along Highway 111 survived for decades as his studio and home, and as a testament to the remoteness of his choice spot (in what is now Indiana Wells,) only to be unceremoniously demolished within recent memory to make way for nothing. ![]() Sister and brother Rachel and Marius de Brabrant had a spectacular compound in the Movie Colony where they painted and hosted fellow artist Hanson Puthuff. He painted there under the patronage of John Burnham at his extensive enclave, (which survives today as Colony 29.) Burnham wanted to foster the arts by providing a residential colony for their support. Nicholai Fechin, a Russian-born artist, famous for his Native American portraits, lived in a small collection of houses at the base of Mt. The subject scenery was conducive to both approaches. Painstaking representations of the unusual landscape and its adapted plants were contrasted with loose, interpretive styles. Brownell McGrew, Fred Penney, Karl Albert, Carl Bray and Jimmy Swinnerton were locals known beyond the valley. As a result, the desert’s thriving artistic community rivaled that of Taos, Santa Fe or Carmel. An artist could actually make a living here at painting. The desert proved a haven for artistic types. World-famous painters Maynard Dixon, Conrad Buff, Clyde Forsythe, Milford Zornes and other “California Impressionists” weren’t the only ones there was a cadre of more permanent desert dwellers as well. Some painters were driven to escape the ravages of tuberculosis, and others, like Lockwood de Forest, who made 10 documented visits in the very beginning of the 20th century, were drawn by the extraordinary views made glorious by an indescribable yellow light. The early 20th century was a time of innocence and exploration in California’s desert wilds. ![]()
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