Brush drawing on 100% rag Stonehenge paper
32" X 26", framed
Diane Best is a lifelong painter, photographer, and filmmaker. For the last 29 years she has been based out of Joshua Tree, in the Mojave Desert. Her explorations have taken her all over the desert southwest, as well as to the ice deserts of the Arctic and Antarctic. Her palette is the landscape itself.
dbestart.com, @dianebestart
I have always been influenced by my environment. When I lived in the city, I painted people, and after my move to the desert wilderness in 1995, my focus shifted to the landscape. At that time, I was doing freelance work for Nickelodeon on shows that were nature-based, so it was a great help to be surrounded by physical references.
I was immediately drawn to the Joshua trees, with their unique shapes and personalities. I always imagined them uprooting themselves and dancing away. It didn’t take me long to start drawing and painting them. They are a very complex plant, in color and in shape, so I simplified the work to black & white. My thinking was that I would figure out their structure first, then deal with the color later. After 25 years and hundreds of “brush drawings” later, I am still working mostly in black & white. I have painted and drawn these trees on all kinds of handmade papers, barks, and wood veneers, mostly with black acrylic paint and graphite.
In 2006, the horrendous Sawtooth Fire swept through the Pioneertown area so fast, people barely escaped with their lives. That was my first direct experience with such devastation of Joshua trees. Though it was heartbreaking, something about seeing the actual “bones” of the tree inspired me to make two paintings of the burnt landscape and the skeletal trees.
Around 2010, I purchased some Joshua tree wood from a man whose father had made the veneer from a dead tree on his property in the 1970’s. This was a unique opportunity to make tree paintings on the tree’s own wood, which I was able to do until my supply ran out.
In 2015, another fire (the Lake Fire) swept through the wilderness area around our property, and the house we had spent eight years building burned to the ground, along with many Joshua trees, including the huge ancient tree in front of our home—probably 200 years old. I never made any paintings or drawings based on that—it was too painful to address.
In 2020, a 3rd large fire hit the Mojave National Preserve. It devastated an entire Joshua tree forest and destroyed an estimated 1.3 million trees. By this time, it just felt that California was always on fire, desert included. Again, this hit hard, especially in light of the fact that most of these trees would not recover. The Lake Fire that burned through my property was very unusual in that the trees produced “pups” fairly quickly. I was able to bring a fire ecologist to the land to assess the damage. He was surprised to see the quick recovery of many of the trees—he had not witnessed that before.
I can’t really express in words my connection to this desert icon. My visual work is the way. At this point, the Joshua trees are firmly implanted in my psyche, and I draw from memory.