Desert Transcendentalist

The Ray Serene, 1925

Have you every gone to an art exhibit and found that the artist's work had a sort of emotional effect on you?  That's what happened to me last Saturday when I went to see an exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum titled "Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist".  Her work really speaks to my soul and I couldn't begin to explain why.  I just loved it.

The exhibit is described as the "first survey of the under-recognized American painter in more than 24 years."



Star Gazer, 1929

This painting to the right is called Sand Storm and is described as showing how the sun looks as it starts to break through that heavy cloud of sand and dust toward the end of the storm and the rainbow that might appear after the storm. If you've never experienced that type of storm, I can tell you this really does capture the light of the sun breaking through the brown haze.

Agnes Pelton was born in 1881 and died in 1961.  She was introduced to the desert southwest in 1919 when she visited a friend in Taos New Mexico.  She eventually settled in a place called Cathedral City in the California southern desert.

One thing that struck me was the similarity between Agnes Pelton and an artist whose work I saw at the Guggenheim in New York last fall.  That artist was Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist I posted about here.

They both were under-recognized and they both were influenced by metaphysical views. Pelton joined a group of artists known as the
Transcendental Painting Group (TPG).

Tomorrow I'll show some works from other members of the group that were shown in another area of the museum and set up to compliment this exhibit.