JANE CULP PAINTINGS
2 DESERTS- HIGH & LOW
Southern California wilderness paintings from the Mojave and Colorado Deserts
February 2-26, 2023, Reception Feb. 4, 4-6
29 Palms Art Gallery
74056 Cottonwood Dr.
off Nat’l Park Dr. below East entrance to Joshua Tree N.P.
Hours; 11-3 Friday, Saturday & Sunday (760) 367-7819
TWO DESERTS – The Land of Little Rain Baking in the Sun
HIGH DESERT: the MOJAVE; On-site Paintings from Joshua Tree National Park and the Anza watershed at Coyote Canyon. -elevation 4000 ft. and up, formed by glacier movement over huge granite domes, split by earthquake faults and beaten down by harsh weather of wind and water. It snows in the High Desert , freezing and cracking huge granitic forms into strange sculptures that are then scoured by sand storms and colored by molten eruptions from neighboring volacanos.
LOW DESERT; SONORAN /COLORADO DESERT. On-site Paintings From the Anza Borrego Desert Badlands this Colorado desert lies at and below sea level within the California Salton Sea trenches and called the Borrego Badlands. Once covered by sea water , the dry Badlands earth crust is formed by fragile mud and sand, and tiny calcium- rich aquatic creature shells. Mud sides of the deep trenches are sculpted by earthquake, wind, sun and rain.
Jane Culp’s muscular paintings and drawings make palpable the rush she feels when on location interacting with nature. From her modernist perspective she conveys a powerful sense of the moment using surface tension and movement. “I’m interested in the life and language of form,” she explains. “How form talks as it goes into space, how light and distance swallow and selectively magnify the forms, how a rhythmic movement in space releases forms that change direction, split, bulge, and fall back into space.” Working in harsh weather conditions that force her to strap her easel to her knees, Culp explores wilderness terrain along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, transporting viewers from her home base north of the Anza-Borrego Desert, through Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks, up to Tioga Pass, and into Yosemite Valley.
Jane Culp’s journey as an artist began in St. Louis, Missouri, and segued through Yale University when the reign of abstract expressionism yielded to pop art. By the mid-1980s she was dividing her time between New York, San Francisco, and Southern California. Married to New York painter and critic Louis Finkelstein, Culp lived most of the year in Manhattan and summered near the Delaware Water Gap, where they both painted the surrounding landscape. After Finkelstein died, Culp moved full-time to an off-grid cabin and studio she built on sixty acres of California high desert that she has transformed into a sanctuary for birds and animals. Stanley Lewis is a painter living in Leeds, Massachusetts, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught for more than forty years, including at Kansas City Art Institute, Smith College, American University, New York Studio School, and summers at Chautauqua.
