Who Was Agnes Pelton, the Desert Transcendentalist?

from The Charmed Studio Podcast for Artists · host Thea Fiore Bloom PhD

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.My friend and Charmed Studio subscriber Alicia Pierre has a YouTube channel and Instagram page devoted to the societal contributions made by women who did not have children. Here is a video she did one such woman, Rosa Parks, 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. To be charming and subscribe to the blog and get free access to my writing toolkit for artists click here.If you enjoy this strange show, I would be really grateful if you left a review over on Apple Podcasts. Creating is a solitary business and kind words in public help us artists feel we are not spending our days whistling in the dark, right? If you have are signed in to Apple, Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know why on earth you occasionally listen to me of all people. Blessings on your lovely head, in advance.For info on one-on-one writing coaching with Thea go here. This blog is produced by The Charmed Studio Blog and Podcast™, LLC. And when you get scared about writing and want to relax, remember what Anne Lamott says."100 years, all new people."You can do this. Occasionally, my show notes may contain an Amazon affiliate link. This means if you buy books or stuff via my podcast link, I may receive a tiny commission and do a happy dance. There is no extra fee for you. I only link to items I personally use and love: products I feel help heart-centered artists and writers. Thank you. :)

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published Sep 12, 2026

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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.