West
Acrylic, charcoal, paper on canvas. 12 x 12 in. 2025.

Been getting around some in the low desert lately, including a really fun opening night Feb. 5 for the latest exhibit at Desert Art Center in Palm Springs. We showed up early to do a little art-crawling in the Uptown Design District, a new event every first Friday that is organized by DAC. The weather and company could not have been better. And I must say, they do have many fine consumer items in the shops uptown, even by my finicky standards! Fun! This painting, “West”, is one of three that I had hanging in the exhibition at DAC, and I’m pleased to say that it sold the first weekend.

I also finally made it last month to Desert Open Studios, featuring artists across the Coachella Valley. We ended up visiting only a few because we spent so much time at each – the art was great, and folks were so friendly. We went out to Indio to visit Carlos Ramirez, whose work we’ve admired for a while; he and his wife were so kind to spend time with us, sharing eras and layers of his oeuvre. We met ceramicist Kevin Nierman, who for 30 years ran a pottery studio for kids in Berkeley before retiring to a classic and most enviable midcentury modern home in Palm Springs. He took us inside to see his stunning collection of historic Pueblo pottery as well as his own unique destroyed-and-rebuilt pieces. Janssen Artspace was buzzing with artists and visitors and lots of juicy art, including that of Robert Webster who creates three-dimensional facades of midcentury architecture on canvas. We ended the day visiting with venerable Joshua Tree artist Frederick Fulmer and Palm Springs painter Lynda Keeler at her studio. I’ve been intrigued for some time by Keeler’s abstract maps of the natural and built environment of the desert.

As my conversations with the artists grew deeper, frequently the same themes emerged: the political crisis; the accompanying fear, anger, and exhaustion; and how to handle it in our art process. Distress lurked just beneath the good times, but we were determined to not cede our right to be human, to share, to enjoy.

I showed Lynda Keeler an image of this recent monoprint:

Madness I
Acrylic gel-press monoprint. 5 x 7 in. 2026. .

She spontaneously took down from the wall a small colorful panel painted with the word “NOW”, and gave it to me. It was one of a pair that she had done I believe at the request of a project preparing for the 2024 election. The time, indeed, is now.

But my travels went still lower in the desert this last week, on a trip to Death Valley, the lowest point on the continent. The bloom has started early there, with brown-eyed and yellow primrose and purple phacelia already dotting the eroded rock walls of Golden Canyon, the rim of Ubehebe Crater, and the slopes of the sand dunes. Desert hollies were heavy with blue-green seed at Zabriskie Point, and the apricot mallows are coming back all the way up on the heights of Dante’s View.

So much spring freshness. So much ancient, irreducible earth.

We took the time to finally visit the endangered Devils Hole pupfish at the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. There, springs and seeps of the mostly underground Amargosa River come to the surface as the river heads south, then hooks around back to the north to finally empty at Badwater, on the floor of Death Valley. Isolated populations of different strains of pupfish remain in several of the river springs along the way, separated for 10,000 years from their long-ago cousins. We stood on the boardwalk at the refuge, in a spot where a casino had been planned as part of the 30,000-home development “Calvada”. That development was stopped by a determined community and a watershed Supreme Court decision to protect the pupfish in 1976.

The time, indeed, is always.

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