In his 1960 book, Painters of the Desert, Ed praises the desert itself, and then proceeds to express his sense of awe for those able to wordlessly capture its beauty and magic with the color of paint.

He writes, "The Desert ... Here it lies, unchanged by a thousand centuries, as mystic as in the days of Abraham. It is compounded of sun and shadow, starlight and sage."

"Who can define it? Who can explain its mystery? Most men cannot."

Yet a few can. They are the special ones. They are the ones who do not speak of the desert in words. They speak of it in the language of color.

They are the painters. To them, the desert speaks to them in great silence. They answer in silence. Then their pictures speak the message of the desert as transmitted through the mystic gift of inner perception which enables them to sense a truth and to put it down on canvas so others may see too."

Ainsworth's Painters of the Desert showcases thirteen different desert painters. Ed knew each of them, and paints a word picture for each, stroked and nuanced with his own palette of storytelling eloquence.

Jimmy Swinnerton ... "He has dipped his brushes in the sunset, caught the golden glow of dawn on his palette, and captured the rainbow atop a desert dune. ... Today he stands, as he has stood for so long, before the easel of Nature and composes on canvas the symphony of creation, dedicated to the harmony of color on the sounding board of the world."

Jimmy painted landscapes outdoors. He said, '... Anybody today who is guided by the rules of the academicians is inadequate. We can't be held back by any human rules if we are to catch the reality of the wonder of Nature. That's what I say to young painters. 'Get out of the Studio! Go to Nature! Only Nature can give you what you prate about as messages. There aren't any genuine messages until you get out and become so absorbed in the beauty surrounding you that you forget to smoke, or eat, or drink -- just paint!'"

John W. Hilton would invite friends and fellow artists to his annual cleansing ritual to help improve and purify his painting. "Flames of a huge bonfire crackled and roared in the blackness of the desert night. Sparks roared upward from the ironwood logs as if trying to rival the winking stars in the arching sky. Into the searing firelight stepped a man. In his arms he bore a burden. Suddenly he threw it into the midst of the flames. The blaze burst into new fury, which consumed this strange added fuel in a moment. Back stepped the man. 'Happy New Year!' came back the chorus from dozens of figures ringing the immense fire.

And so, in his annual custom, did John W. Hilton burn an entire year's accumulation of his own paintings which he had decided were unworthy of him. This ritual was carried out at the stroke of midnight every New Year's Eve in Box Canyon during all the years when John Hilton was trying to learn to paint the desert."

"In reality, Conrad Buff's story might be called a combination of European hardship and the American Depression welding a human soul into splendid proportions.

From a little distance, a Buff painting does literally radiate sunshine and light. Technically, the attainment of such a quality means labor extending sometimes over a period of months. The tiny criss-cross lines of varying colors which make up a Buff painting are the result of a lifetime of study and experiment, carried out with painstaking labor.

He always uses brushes, never the palette knife. His colors are simple -- two reds, two blues, two yellows, one white. From them he blends the infinity of creation."

This spring, Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery is proud to present "The Southwest," an exhibition of California's great desert painters. Besides works by Jimmy Swinnerton, John W. Hilton, and Conrad Buff, there are works by Ralph Love, Joshua Meador, Carl Hoerman, Milford Zornes, Jade Fon, Grace Fountain, Dedrick Stuber, Ferdinand Burgdorff, Bill Freeman as well as the desert paintings of Kathi Hilton and the Grand Canyon paintings of Linda Sorensen.

"Shadows on the Mesa," pays tribute to a special place and time, the Wetherill-Colville Guest Ranch in the early 20th century. A legendary group of painters set up their base camp at John and Louisa's Wetherill Guest Ranch, among them Maynard Dixon, William Robinson Leigh, James Swinnerton, Carl Oscar Borg, and Gunnar Widforss. Gary Fillmore tells the story of the ranch, the artists and their art. We have a copy displayed in the gallery accompanying our Grand Canyon and Monument Valley paintings.

The exhibition includes fifty-five paintings featuring Italian, French, Dutch, English, Scottish and American artists. The Scottish National Gallery was founded in 1850. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery came nearly 40 years later, opening its doors in 1889. The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art opened in 1960. The chronological layout of the exhibition makes it easy for art students, young or old, to appreciate the sequencial history of western art. Below is but a sampling of the exhibition with information about each from the exhibition's placards. We highly recommend taking advantage of th eopportunit for viewing these often iconic and frequently monumental works in person.

Diego Velazquez was only 18 or 19 when he painted Old Woman Cooking Eggs. It belongs to a group of kitchen and tavern scenes which include familiar scenes with still life elements. The models were probably real people, friends or relatives, who reappear in other paintings by Velazquez.

There are only 36 known paintings of Johannes Vermeer in existence, and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha is his only one illustrating a Biblical subject. Because of its large size, it is believed this painting was intended for a Catholic Church. It shows the story of the dutiful Martha objecting to her sister Mary for listening to Jesus while she tends to the kitchen duties serving the meal.

Thomas Gainsborough is best known for his portraits, but he also enjoyed, over the course of his long career, creating landscapes. He shows a familiarity with the landscapes of 17th century Dutch painters, as many Dutch paintings made their way to London. The wide horizontal dimensions of this painting reflects it was created for a "chimney piece" above a mantel.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's work was especially admired by the French Enlightenment writer Denis Diderot for combining Rococo style with the morality of neoclassicism. "A Girl with a Dead Canary" was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865 while Greuze was at the height of his career. This young girl mourning the death of a pet canary would have had a double meaning for 18th century French audiences who would have seen it as a symbolic reference to the loss of virginity.

Sir Henry Raeburn's Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch is one of his best paintings and today is an icon of Scottish culture. Rev. Walker's skating pose resembles the balletic pose of Giambologna's statue of Mercury in Flight. It also illustrates the increasingly popular sport of ice skating among Edinburgh's elite. Reverend Walker was a member of the city's highly selective skating society.

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot linked neoclassical landscape painting with Impressionism. Ville-d'Avray is a village located west of Paris where Corot's parents owned a small country house. In 1850, Entree du bois a Ville-d'Avray was retouched by Corot's friend Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena who added the red cap of the woman seated by the side of the road, meant to be a bold complement to the otherwise cool palette.

John Constable said of The Vale of Deadham, "I have painted a large upright landscape, perhaps my best." He was familiar with the grand traditions of European landscape painting from artists and dealers he met early in his career in London. His landscapes of the English countryside are known for their Romantic idealism.

Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon has a companion painting, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, both inspired by William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Due to inquisitive fingers wanting to explore minutely executed details, the museum displays this large intricate painting behind glass.

Following an 1842 trip to the Near East, Richard Dadd suffered a mental breakdown, murdered his father, and was committed to a psychiatric institution for the rest of his life. This Portrait of Sir Alexander Morison is of Richard Dadd's doctor Alexander Morison who was also a pioneer in psychiatric medicine. The setting for the portrait was provided by Dr. Morison's daughter. It includes the Morison house in the fishing village of Newhaven, Scotland.

Camille Pissarro is often called the dean of the Impressionists, and was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions. The Marne at Chennevieres was painted while Pissarro rented a house at La Varene-Saint-Hilaire, southeast of Paris located on the Marne River. This painting shows that Pissarro was influenced by the work of Charles Francois Daubigny and Gustave Courbet.

American Frederic Edwin Church created ambitious landscapes of America's great natural wonders. By the middle of the 19th century, Niagara Falls had become a popular tourist destination. In Niagara Falls, the detail of Church's bare limbs of trees in the foreground are strikingly balanced by the sublime handling of the falling water and luminous mist.

Edgar Degas' Portrait of his close friend, Diego Martelli is a view from on high, flattening the composition with his legs is sharp perspective. The asymmetry and cropping of the red slippers shows the influence of Japanese prints.

Behind the sofa is a map of Paris with the Seine recognizable running through the southern neighborhoods of Paris.

Twenty-Seven year old Gertrude Vernon, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, is shown here at a time when she was convalescing from nervous exhaustion. John Singer Sargent was well known for his society portraits, and here he achieves a sense of high glamour for his subject with the hues of fluid brushwork and delicate harmonies of color. It shows both opulence and grace.

Paul Gauguin's Three Tahitians was done during his second trip to Tahiti 1895-1901. This painting may have come from a Tahitian song (translated "The Savage") or it may be a classical theme of Hercules' choice between vice and virtue, as one woman offers a mango (like Eve's apple) while the other wears a wedding ring while holding a bouquet of flowers.

Henri Mattisse wrote Andre Derain inviting him to spend the summer at Collioure, a small port on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border. Derain was impressed by the intense light. He described the

light as "a golden hue that suppressed shadows." Working with Matisse, he forged a new style, later to be known as Fauvism, simplifying his paintings with sensuously expressive powerful color.

By 1912, Pierre Bonnard had abandoned the dark tonalities of his earlier works. He now preferred working with a more vibrant palette of glowing purples, pinks, greens and yellows. Lane at Veernonnet was especially eye catching when seen in person, especially the pinks atop the wall. In 1910, he rented a small half-timbered house called Ma Roulotte (My Caravan) at Vernonnet, a small village on the River Seine in Normandy. He kept returning to this house to paint until 1939.

As a young artist, Francis Campbell Bolleau Cadell was one of four Scottish artists known as the Scottish Colourists. Their group was known for bringing intense Mediterranean hues into Scottish landscapes, still lifes and portraiture. In the 1920's however, Cadell abandoned loose impressionistic soft tones for more geometric compositions, tight, angular and almost two dimensional in effect. The model is one of Cadell's neighbors who often posed for him. Portrait of a Lady in Black shows another of Cadell's paintings in the background.

His diminutive size is big part of the story. His body did not allow him to pursue the expected manly activities of his aristocratic rank such as hunting or sports. Instead, he used his artistic talents depicting the exciting and in some cases deliciously illicit activities of those on the edge of accepted society. He painted these people in their haunts, the bars, brothels and dance halls of Montmartre, a former working class section of Paris where people came to seek anonymity and acceptance.

In his day, Toulouse-Lautrec was not the huge name he is today. He rubbed shoulders with other not so well known bohemian artists: Vincent Van Gogh, Suzanne Valadon and Emile Bernard. When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to do a series of posters. The Moulin Rouge reserved a seat for him, and he sold his paintings to Moulin Rouge patrons.

La Vive Modern, a traveling museum exhibition, seeks to give examples of peripheral movements springing from the Post Impressionist period. The show includes 191 works of art done by fifty artists, as well as some zinc cut-out silhouettes used in the shadow theater productions offered a the Chat Noir. The exhibition shows how the new middle class, developed under industrialization and peacetime, sought to entertain themselves. Here are a few examples.

Although the show is interesting, the focus of the show seems scattered, lacking a sufficient framework as to how this art is connected with the place, Paris of the 1890's, or with the work of other artists of the period. The casual museum visitor may have some difficulty in gaining a sense of what the Bohemian life of Montmartre was like or why the art of this period is important.

Our Gallery Hours are from 12:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M., Wednesday through Sunday. We are also available for scheduled appointments, especially for those who wish to view the gallery on Mondays or Tuesdays. Please call Dan at the gallery and schedule a visit, or call him on his cellphone, 510-414-9821

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art