After absorbing de Forest’s paintings, your eye naturally travels to the desert’s open places, looking not for impressive landmarks, but for the beauty of absence and the nothingness the painter sought.

For the painter, sculptor, and writer Jeff Lipschutz, the desert is not so much an excursion or a dialectical canvas as it is seed material that informs his own DNA.

Nicole Antebi, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches in Monterey, uses a variety of media for projects that often take the form of multifaceted installations.

The desert has long exerted a powerful magnetism on artists. By 1900, painters seeking a fresh source of inspiration and a healthier climate came to the Palm Springs area to work en plein air and contribute a chapter to the story of early California Impressionism.

For a long time, Jesse Reding Fleming had no interest in the desert; he thought of it as a “dead place.”

The sexiest, most seductive art exhibition in Southern California delivers plenty of eye candy: beautiful bodies — many of them celebrities — luxuriating around swimming pools.

Creative types converge and experiment on the High Desert; Creating an Art Economy; Palm Springs Art Museum Expands; The Annenberg Collection; and a New Art Fair for Palm Springs.

Unlike tourists enamored by slick and shiny Las Vegas, Charlie Ciali clicked with the city’s lifeless side.

Marilyn Pearl Loesberg paces with a phone to her ear. She’s on the line with an art dealer in New York, where she’s organizing two exhibitions for the late Abstract Expressionist Clinton Hill.

Early in his tenure as executive director of Palm Springs Art Museum, Steve Nash spoke of renovating the interior, pursuing more compelling and important exhibitions, and sharpening its collection strategy in a way that would serve the community and brighten the desert institution’s star among the “constellation of museums in Southern California.”