John W. Hilton was a 37 year old artist on the way up when he interviewed his 66 year old friend of 8 years, Jimmy Swinnerton.

John met Jimmy at his gem shop and small art gallery in Thermal, California, a small town junction at the corner of Highway 86 and 66th Avenue, directly across the road from a local landmar, Valerie Jean’s Date Shop.

Hilton rented a modest little building from Russ, the owner of Valerie Jean’s. Terms of the lease allowed Hilton to sell just about anything except date shakes. Most of John’s business came from desert gems he prospected himself, but he "tried to" sell a few of his own “self-taught” paintings to passing tourists.

At first, those paintings didn’t attract much attention. Then one lucky day, a well dressed woman walked in and bought a 20" x 30" scene for the sum of $30 (the sum John needed at the time to fix his Jeep).

When the woman got home, she told a friend who in turn told her friend about it. That friend was artist Jimmy Swinnerton. Acting on this friendly tip, Swinnerton paid a visit to the gem shop, introduced himself, and soon ended up in Hilton’s back room, where the two (despite the 29 year gap between their ages) immediately hit it off, swapping desert stories and talking shop, with Swinnerton offering a bit of friendly painting advice.

Jimmy enjoyed the visit and told his painting friends who, in turn, began dropping by Hilton's Gem Shop. These visiting artists included Clyde Forsythe, Maynard Dixon, and even the great Russian-American painter Nicolai Fechin. Before long, Hilton’s gem shop had become a favorite gathering place for desert painters, and the little back room quietly transformed into a prestigious art academy, complete with a legendary faculty and exactly one student.

A few years later, Hilton picked up another part-time gig, writing for Desert Magazine. Like good writers everywhere, he wrote about what he knew best. The result was his engaging July 1941 article on Jimmy Swinnerton, an insider’s portrait shaped by friendship, desert dust, and years of shared stories.

Jimmy Swinnerton came to the desert to die in peace, and found so much beauty to paint that he crossed up the doctors and got well. Today he is as well known for his oil landscapes as for his "Canyon Kiddies" and comic strips. "Nature is the only real teacher of art," he says. And this applies to the art of living as well as painting. "No one can become bigoted and narrow in the midst of broad desert vistas and great canyon walls." Here is the story cf one of the best known artists in America.

JIMMY Swinnerton was seated at his easel in his Hollywood studio. Before him was a partly finished painting of a huge black cliff in southern Utah, which even in its uncompleted state seemed to breathe the very atmosphere of the desert. Around the walls were fine examples of Indian craftsmanship, and on the floors were geometrically designed Navajo rugs.

As he talked on I completely forgot that I was in the heart of a thriving metropolis. The desert seemed to invade the room, and the far places Jimmy loved to paint, and the many Indian friends he had in the Southwest seemed to crowd to life there as he mentioned them.

On his drawing board was a layout for one of his famous "Canyon Kiddie ' cartoons. "It's funny," Jimmy said, "how I came to draw the 'Canyon Kids.' I always liked Indians, especially the kids, and I never had any trouble getting along with them. After all, a broad smile and a little patience and understanding is all it takes to make them like you."

"You know," he went on, "Indians are extremely art-conscious. You can see it in everything they make and do. Every little household utensil has its own good proportion or decoration, and art has an important place in their religion. Why, they even use art, in the form of sand drawings, to cure the sick. Some of our modern hospitals with glaring white walls would do well to study the psychological effect of color and design on sick persons. Maybe the Indians have something!

"But getting back to the 'Canyon Kids,' I had been drawing Little Jimmy for Mr. Hearst for a long while When one day I was called upon to help arrange a children's party. I thought for some time about something that would please the youngsters, and finally decided upon a set of place cards showing little Indians performing their everyday tasks and playing with their pets, surrounded by the colorful background of their homes. The longer I worked on these little fellows the more interested I became, and it seemed to me that I really had something in them.

"The next time I saw Mr. Hearst I showed him a set that I had made for myself, and asked him if they had any possibilities. He glanced over them, and put them in his pocket, saying that he might print them as comic post cards or something. I felt a little disappointed, but passed it off as another dud idea. After all, Hearst ought to know. It was some time later that he called me up and asked me about the 'Canyon Kids.' I had forgotten all about them, but not he. He told me that the editors of Good Housekeeping were looking for something in the way of an Indian cartoon in color, accompanied by a poem for children.

I got back the originals and started on my first layout. I could draw the kids, all right, and the hills and desert and animals, but I had never in all my life written a poem. Well, when I got through, the stuff rhymed, which seemed a miracle in itself. I sent the first batch of cartoons and poems in, and after a few days received a reply from the editor. He thought the drawings were great, 'but didn't I think that the poems smacked a bit of doggerel?' (comic verse composed in irregular rhythm) Well, he published them, and asked for more, but the poetry got no better. From time to time I received gentle hints that the stuff I was writing was not exactly considered literature with a capital 'L.' They even found fault with my grammar, but they kept printing it.

Then one day I was invited to a dinner with the editor and his associate. They spent an entire afternoon and evening pointing out that their magazine had one of the highest literary standards in the country. Finally the associate editor turned to his chief and remarked, 'Did you know that in the past ten years our magazine has published a higher percent of the really good American poetry than any other publication on the market?" It seemed my cue then to take a bow, so I told them in a few brief words how I appreciated their praise, and how I hardly felt worthy of being classed with the best poets of America, but if that was the way they felt I was very happy indeed. I guess they gave me up after that because my characters still say 'ain't' and 'me neither.'

Jimmy Swinnerton's love cf the west comes natural to him. His grandfather crossed the plains twice in a covered wagon back in the 1850s, and Jimmy himself was born in the pioneer town of Eureka, California, in 1875. He received his early schooling in San Francisco, and at the age of 15 took up his life's work in an art school. He met George Innes in the studio of William Keith, and they both gave him considerable encouragement and advice, urging him to go into the fine arts.

But at the age of 16, after a year of art schooling, Jimmy got a job doing political cartoons on the San Francisco Examiner, and dropped painting. Keith never spoke to him again.

Here he started Little Jimmy, one of the first four comic strips in America. He moved to New York with the idea, and continued to draw comics and do political and sport cartoons until overwork and city life nearly killed him.

He decided to return to his first love, the west, and settled on the desert to die in peace. But strangely enough he surprised both his friends and doctors by regaining his health, thanks to the good advice and help of Mrs. Nellie Coffman, who operated a small sanitarium in the new community of Palm Springs.

The history of Jimmy Swinnerton's fight for health in the desert, and of the friendships with such men as Zane Grey and Carl Eytel would fill a very interesting book. He became intensely interested in the desert, and being an artist saw its great potentialities for paintings. As his health returned he did more and more serious work, and eventually began to find himself. Today, even with health no longer a serious consideration in his life, he spends a great part of his time out in the desert he loves, painting the things he likes.

"Mr. Swinnerton," I asked, "I know that this is a tough question, and covers a lot of ground, but how do you feel about art?"

Jimmy lit his pipe, settled back in his chair, and looked up at the ceiling.

"Johnny," he said, "art is a mighty elusive thing. There is entirely too much written and talked about art and not enough painting and looking. A true artist must distrust what he reads and hears, and believe only the beauty he sees. Painting is an individual effort, and no real artist can follow the pattern of another.

"Nature is the only true teacher. An art school can teach one to observe and to master the ability of drawing and painting, but no mere technical skill is sufficient to bring out the fine things in nature. First an artist must love and humbly study nature, remembering all the while that man with all his skill and scientific knowledge cannot so much as create a blade of grass or a grain of sand. My favorite Bible verse is `Blessed are the humble in spirit.' The best way to approach nature in an humble mood is to go out into the desert alone. No one can become bigoted or narrow in the midst of broad desert vistas and great canyon walls. The duty of the artist is to experience these of himself things, and then reconstruct his experiences on canvas.

"The painter who works entirely in the studio on abstract nothings conjured up by his own feverish brain has very little to give the world. His paintings may find favor in the eyes of a few other neurotics who have had similar nightmares, and if his stuff follows the mechanical rules of color, balance and composition it may furnish fine material for the writings of sensation-seeking art critics and their pseudo-sophisticated followers. But art that does not find its inspiration in nature has little to recommend itself to future generations, and will be remembered principally as a curiosity.

"To me, landscape painting is a shortcut to faith. The artist cannot hope to recreate nature. The finest artist in the world cannot paint a perfect flower. The real purpose of a painting is to call attention to the beauty in nature. A successful painting is a sign post reading, 'Yonder is beauty! Go see for yourself.'

"I prefer painting the desert, because it is not so well posted as other types of landscape. There is no end to the beauty of sand and rocks and sage-brush, but few persons see it when they pass through the desert. All of the serious work I have done has been on the desert, and there is enough there to occupy me the rest of my life."

Last May’s exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art at the Legion of Honor Museum presented Wayne Thiebaud not simply as a painter of iconic cakes and cityscapes, but as an artist in active dialogue with centuries of art history.

By placing his paintings alongside works that inspired him from old masters to modern innovators, the exhibition illuminated Thiebaud’s deep engagement with tradition. Visitors came to understand that his seemingly simple subjects were grounded in rigorous study, visual borrowing, and transformation. The enlightening aspect of the show was its revelation that Thiebaud’s originality grew out of admiration, analysis, and reinterpretation; he was a painter who believed, quite openly, that art builds upon art. He proudly called himself "an Art Thief," and freely advised his students to do the same.

In contrast, The Unknown Thiebaud: Passionate Printmaker at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts narrows the focus to a more intimate and less publicized dimension of his career: his lifelong devotion to printmaking.

Rather than emphasizing influence and art historical lineage, this exhibition highlights Thiebaud's love of the artist's process by focusing on Thiebaud's etchings, lithographs, and other works on paper that span decades of experimentation.

Here, viewers encounter Thiebaud the craftsman. Wayne was fascinated by line, repetition, and the technical challenges of ink and plate. The show enlightens by revealing how seriously he pursued printmaking, not as a sideline to painting but as a parallel practice that sharpened his sense of form and composition.

Together, the two exhibitions complement one another in meaningful ways.

The Legion of Honor show expanded our understanding of Thiebaud’s intellectual and historical reach, while the Sebastopol exhibition brings us closer to his studio practice and personal passion. The Legion of Honor Show showed Thiebaud's place within the grand continuum of Western art. The show at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts shows the discipline and curiosity that animated his daily work. Together, they offer a fuller portrait of Thiebaud’s artistic life, an artist both steeped in tradition and endlessly engaged in the tactile pleasures of creating.

Wayne Thiebaud didn’t just make prints — he loved making prints.

Long before Thiebaud exhibitions at museums, long before his fame, he was a kid at home improvising his own printing press. He’d scratch drawings into a piece of plastic and run it through his family’s old washing machine wringer just to see what would happen. That curiosity — that urge to experiment — never left him.

Even at 99 years old, his inner child still thrived! In 2019, he made his final prints at Crown Point Press, the legendary San Francisco workshop where he created more than 100 prints over 55 years. Beyond his painting, he made woodcuts in Japan, linocuts in France, and worked with presses across the country.

Printmaking wasn’t a side project, it was part of Wayne's artistic makeup. He was obsessed with the physical beauty of it. He loved the feel of it. He relished the resistance of copper under his needle.

“There’s nothing quite like that beautiful, velvet line of a really worked-on drypoint,” he said, that feathery edge of ink that clings to the paper. He loved the etched line for its density and richness. “You just don’t get that any other way.”

Yes, his prints feature the same pies, cakes, cityscapes, and still lifes we know from his paintings. But they are not copies. translations or reproductions. For Thiebaud, printmaking was a laboratory. A place to test ideas about form, how it shifts, stretches, flattens, deepens.

He once said the relationship between painting and printmaking was “reciprocal.” One would “tattle-tale on the other.” Each medium revealed something the other couldn’t.

Printmaking let him flip a composition sideways. Crop it tighter. Make it monumental or intimate. It let him re-ink the same plate in different colors and instantly transform the mood. In painting, that kind of change takes days. In printmaking, it takes a new pass through the press.

And sometimes, he discovered something surprising: a small black-and-white etching could carry more punch, more weight, more drama than a large, luscious oil painting.

The Unknown Thiebaud: Passionate Printmaker is closing soon, March 8!

Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 282 South High Street, Sebastopol.
707-829-4797 | http://SebArts.org