Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Seven: Cactus Garden

When Dennis and Sheila announced that our tourist activity of the day was visiting the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun, I imagined a sleek museum space with white walls that do their best not to distract from the artwork. Dennis grabbed a camera, Sheila handed me her camera, Mindy picked up Maddison, and we were out the door. And when we pulled up to the parking lot and I glimpsed adobe buildings straight out of The Three Amigos surrounded by a rickety fence bleached by sun and wind, with an overwhelming garden of cacti behind it, I began to realize that it wasn’t going to be anything like I thought. The thirty-foot saguaro cactus at the far edge of the lot caught my attention, and I wandered over to it, pulling up my borrowed sunglasses so I could trace its succulent green ridges with unshaded eyes.

The gallery was in fact a set of low adobe buildings, plastered with straw and furnished with old cast-iron ranges and fireplaces that reminded me of swallows’ nests. Desert gardens embraced the land around the houses, in which natural and manmade objects grew side by side: shovel heads perched among yucca, cacti growing out of a rusty trombone, lengths of saguaro ribs strung from a crossbeam as wind chimes. Lean-tos and teepees of rickety desert wood grew in the garden, too, along with trellises decorated with metal flowers and delicate curtains made of unraveled burlap. In the desert, every commodity is precious; every throwaway item has a new use, and every object can become art.

Ettore “Ted” DeGrazia was an artist who lived in the adobe hovel and set up his studio, living and painting here from the mid 1940s until his death in 1982, and the largest of the buildings was dedicated to the actual art gallery. The other houses were open, cool, and airy, smelling of clay and as much pleasant dampness as you’ll ever find in a desert. Large black-and-white photos on the wall gave visitors a glimpse into DeGrazia’s life of paint-making and homemaking in this adobe construction among a garden of cacti. In one of the buildings, we met a musician, wiry, swarthy, sweet-smiling and appearing to be in his 50s, selling CDs. He offered to sing for us. Flipping to a track of one of his albums, he belted out a song in Spanish; the only word I could understand was “amor,” but I loved his sonorous voice and the way he shuffled his fingers as he sang, as if sifting invisible flour. Dennis, who knew him from a photo shoot, informed me that the passionate singer was 74 years old.

Next we visited the chapel, an adobe construction brought to life with art, with a strip of open roof. Dennis and Sheila had gotten married here, beneath a cross of ocotillo branches that crowned the steeple. DeGrazia had adorned the walls with exuberant paintings of people who seemed to reflect the landscape in line, color, texture, and overall feel, as well as birds that seemed to be peacocks or phoenixes or both. Crucifixes, flowers, rosaries and other religious tokens were piled up in the corners, and two small wings for meditation and prayer on either side of the entryway carried a hushed tone of reverence about them.

After wandering the gardens and staring at the myriad forms of cacti, we entered the gallery proper and milled through the rooms of bold, line-impressionistic artwork. Two paintings stand out in my mind: one, a pastel mix of flurrying lines, sleek and speedy, showing a stampede of horses descended from the Spanish stallions. The lines ceased to be lines and came to life, so that I could hear the whinny and feel the dust in my throat. The second was a depiction of an Indian upon his blue horse, his back bent, his red cloak hugged close about his shoulders, with a sharp wind blowing at his back, whipping forward his hair and the horse’s mane. The colors were bold, the lines simple, but I felt caught up in the moment, absorbed as only a true artist’s work can cause.

Despite the beauty of the artwork, I was eager to return to the garden and wind my way through its twisting trails. I marveled at round growths of cactus that was pastel purple, at tall slender yucca plants, at hesitant flowers peeping their heads from the top of cacti, and at the lizards with ringed tails, like lemurs, that hopped and dashed across the dusty pathways.

My mind, once again, has a hard time catching up. This milieu is vastly different from anything I’ve ever seen, from the first shock of a stereotypical cactus to the hand-grown wonder of the desert garden. I would never want to live here, but today I allowed the desert to show its charm and its intricate beauty, and I allowed myself to fall in love.

~Lisa Shafter

Money spent today: $8 (craisin trail mix, whole wheat rolls, pepperoni, two jars of peanut butter, dried bananas and Twizzlers)

Leeway so far: $6.73

Note: photographs courtesy of Dennis Brownfield