Do you know Agnes Pelton, the desert transcendentalist who left New York behind to make a life—and an art—entirely her own? A modernist painter who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, Pelton eventually settled in the California desert, where her paintings became luminous, spiritual, and deeply connected to nature, solitude, and the unseen. Her life is fascinating not only because of the work she made, but because of the life she chose to make around it. In this episode of The Charmed Studio Podcast, I’m exploring Pelton through Mari Coates’s The Pelton Papers and wondering what her unconventional path might have to teach us now. Because Pelton raises a question that feels surprisingly contemporary: What if we’re measuring our lives with the wrong ruler? We talk about comparison-itis, artistic voice, and our endless measuring of success, beauty, relationships, travel, recognition, and the perfectly curated life. What if a rich creative life doesn’t necessarily look impressive from the outside? What if choosing solitude, mystery, nature, and your own way of seeing is its own kind of success? Come spend some time with Agnes Pelton—the remarkable desert artist who chose to see the world on her own terms.
If Agnes Pelton intrigues you, read The Pelton Papers, find out more about The Pelton House, or consider joining the Agnes Pelton Society.
Take a seat with me at this year's Book Creation Café. ☕️
Do you live near the Phoenix Art Museum? They have a few of Pelton's later works in their permanent collection.
As do the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
The Palm Springs Art Museum is also an important place for Pelton, particularly because of her connection to Pelton's earlier landscape paintings of the desert and Cathedral City.
If you like Pelton's work, look at the art of Hilma af Klint, another deeply spiritual artist whose radical abstract paintings were largely unseen for decades.
Have you read Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art? It's the artist's exploration of the spiritual possibilities of color, form, and abstraction.
Read Rudolf Arnheim's 1969 classic, Visual Thinking.
Or check out Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin, which offers another fascinating way to think about how we perceive images, shape, color, movement, and visual relationships.
To read my post Van Gogh Probably Didn't Kill Himself: The Truth Behind the Tortured Artist Myth, go here.
https://thecharmedstudio.com/agnes-pelton-for-artists-and-writers/