Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was a visionary symbolist who depicted the spiritual reality she experienced in moments of meditative stillness. Art for her was a discipline through which she gave form to her vision of a higher consciousness within the universe. Using an abstract vocabulary of curvilinear, biomorphic forms and delicate, shimmering veils of light, she portrayed her awareness of a world that lay behind physical appearances—a world of benevolent, disembodied energies animating and protecting life. For most of her career, Pelton chose to live away from the distractions of a major art center, first in Water Mill, Long Island, from 1921 to 1932, and subsequently in Cathedral City, a small community near Palm Springs, California. Her isolation from the mainstream art world meant that her paintings were relatively unknown during her lifetime and in the decades thereafter. She was a little-known artist whose luminous, abstract images of transcendence are only now being fully recognized. (Whitney Museum of Art)
I was inexplicably and deeply drawn to and moved by the work of Agnes Pelton when I first saw it at the Palm Springs Museum of Art during one of my many forays into Joshua Tree, CA and the surrounding area. Later I discovered that Pelton, a contemporary of Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin, had visited Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, New Mexico in 1919. There, she painted portraits and landscapes which she exhibited in Santa Fe at the School of American Research. The more I learned of her life: her practice of Eastern Philosophy, and her passion for the Desert and its people of the American Southwest, as two examples; the more I felt a personal affinity to her. In my small portrait honoring her, I have layered the torn cover from a pad of drawing paper; a page from an old astronomy book; a New Mexico red Chile wrapper; a Sicilian soap box.
