The spring La Quinta Art Celebration returns to the La Quinta Civic Center on Thursday, Feb. 27, with four days of festivities—music, fine food, libations and, of course, art—at what has become one of the Coachella Valley’s premier arts events.
Not only is the festival one of the top-ranked fine-arts events in the country, according to Kathleen Hughes, of Scope Events; it’s at one of the most beautiful festival sites in the country. The 14-acre campus sits in the heart of the city, adjacent to La Quinta City Hall and the library, and features a lake with a geyser stream, surrounded by a rolling grass park.
“It is a gorgeous site,” said Hughes.
Thousands of art-lovers are expected to visit the festival. They’ll experience original artworks by more than 180 juried, world-class artists, including 30 artists who will be exhibiting for the first time. Oil painter Annie Flynn, a first-time artist to the festival from St. Louis, is the featured poster artist for spring 2025.
Most of the artists are from out of town—but the Independent talked to four local participating artists and asked them to describe the creative process behind the works they’ll be showing at the festival.
When Reese Schroeder left his job in Boston almost four years ago, and settled in the Coachella Valley sight unseen, he planned to continue doing what he’d done for the past 35 years: working as an architect.
“I had absolutely no idea about Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho, Indio,” Schroeder said. “I didn’t know anything about California. I’d only been here one time on vacation, and I was moving here in support of family members, thinking, ‘Well, I’ll work remotely for the architectural firm back in Boston, and we’ll stay here a while, and we’ll probably move back home.’ As soon as I got here, I was just kind of blown away at the amount of art opportunities, artists, venues—everything.”
As luck would have it, Schroeder had been dabbling pretty heavily in art. “I’ve been doing digital painting for myself, in one form or another, since 1988,” he said. “I didn’t show it to anyone until 1996.”
Once he did, his work got noticed. He was asked to donate a piece to the American Institute of Architects in Dallas. His work was chosen for the Providence Art Club‘s national exhibition in Rhode Island. “They’re the second-oldest art group in the nation,” Schroeder said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m on to something here.’”
Schroeder’s work falls under the festival category of 2-D mixed media and digital art. He describes it as “digital painting,” similar to painting with a brush, but without the limits of the canvas.
“The computer does absolutely nothing in my process except give me a white screen that I can start drawing on,” he said. “It allows me to choose colors just like a water colorist or an acrylic or an oil painter would do. I can make things more transparent or more opaque, but the computer itself, it doesn’t create art. I don’t use AI, so I’m literally painting and drawing, just as I used to in art school, but now I use a stylus and a digitizer tablet.”
Schroeder retired from architecture in 2021. “I spent 35 years in the profession,” he said. “I became an architect because I loved to draw, and over the years, I realized my passion for drawing and art was greater than my passion for architecture.”
The serendipity of landing in an arts oasis is still sinking in.
“When we moved to the Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage area, I looked around, and I realized that I had landed in an incredible art community,” he said. “And that if I was ever going to do anything, this was going to be the place.”
Richard Curtner owes the intricate word collages he creates to an exotic vacation … and a lack of resources.
While taking time off from his construction-painting job, he traveled to the Dominican Republic, where he would meet his wife-to-be.
“I decided to stay and get to know her,” he said. “And it’s just a super-nice area, you know, perfect beaches and all that. It was so economical that I could work the summer here in the States, and live the rest of the year over there without having to worry.”
But there was an issue: Curtner couldn’t find the art supplies he needed to keep working in his first medium.
“Part of the problem was finding the paints I needed,” he said. “They were expensive and hard to get, but I could find magazines relatively cheap. So that’s when I started getting into collage.”
Curtner got positive reviews from museums and galleries in the Dominican Republic for his early work. “They were saying that they had never seen anything like it. I just decided to keep going with it, keep perfecting it,” he said.
Curtner and his wife, Sardis, recently marked 24 years of living in the Coachella Valley. He calls his work “art for word-lovers.” His is an exacting process, with some unwritten rules he chooses to follow.
“Everything is found color,” he said. “(It takes) hours and hours, searching through magazines, just sorting colors and words, because it’s all found. I’m not creating any of it. It’s all the original paper. I could be looking for colors, but if it doesn’t have the right words, I can’t use it. And then every cutout that I use, every piece that I use in an artwork, has to have some kind of text on it.”
Curtner said he grew up immersed in art and literature. His mother recently found a collage he had done when he was 3 years old.
“I’ve always loved writing poetry and short stories as a way to express myself,” he said. “I don’t remember a time, even since early childhood, not painting or drawing, so it was a way to combine my two passions, the visual arts along with the literary arts.”
John Straub learned about photography from his father, and he’s known his way around a dark room since his teens. He took that skill set and combined it with a love of cars, and before long, he was shooting magazine covers and car shows.
He has the pandemic to thank for his transition to “fine art” photography.
“When (it) hit, everything stopped,” Straub said. “You can’t travel; you can’t do anything at that point. So I thought, ‘What am I going to do with photography?’ As a kid, I always enjoyed playing with little models. I thought, ‘You know, I can make these little stories, and then I can shoot them with my camera.’ That’s really how it started, to be honest with you.”
Miniature “people” inhabit his artful stories. In “Happy Hour,” a bathing beauty takes a high dive off a lemon-rind twist, headed into a blue martini. There is a mini ladder positioned for the climb up.
“The stories seem to put a smile on people’s faces,” Straub said.
He was pleasantly surprised at the positive reception for his work.
“My very first show, I wasn’t sure if people were even going to like them,” said Straub. “The thing that I enjoy is when people see them at a show, they get smiles on their faces, and they start cracking up and pointing. People really get a kick out of these things. I think it is because it’s happy art, that’s what it really comes down to.”
He said he has many repeat customers who have become collectors.
Straub will be showing his whimsical collection of My Teeny Life images at the La Quinta Art Celebration. He and his wife, Monique Straub, split their time between dual home/studio locations in La Quinta and San Clemente.
Monique (pronounced mo-nay) Straub is a native San Diegan. She has been a full-time artist for almost 35 years and transitioned a while back from pastels to oils to accommodate clients’ wishes for big works of art.
Her oil-on-canvas work is bold, colorful and tropical; its bold patterns would be appropriate for the spring runway collection of a FARM Rio fashion show. Giant sunflowers, palm trees and date palms are depicted across vast landscapes; they almost seem to vibrate. Straub calls the style “Contemporary Bohemian.”
“I started out in soft pastel, which is like chalk, and developed my style and color palettes,” she said. “I (noticed), once I started showing, that folks like things very large. Pastels need to be covered with glass and (need) heavy frames to protect them, so that was very difficult to do in large scale. So, I changed over to oil probably 10 years ago.”
She did early work as a landscape estimator for a commercial landscaping company, which may explain the variety and detail of native flora in her work.
“Having a background in the landscape industry and always loving to garden and do things outdoors, I gravitate toward botanical and landscape paintings,” Straub said. “Moving out to the desert here for the last two years, I focus more on desert landscapes. I do a number of shows on the coast, and when I’m doing those shows, I change it up and do a little more floral and still-life paintings. It just pretty much depends on what location I’m showing a lot of times, and I will do things in a series. I like things outdoors and landscape, mostly.
Straub said she took classes in technical illustration and commercial photography.
“I was a wedding photographer for a short time, so always something creative, but the oil painting and the pastel painting just really resonated with me, so I’ve stuck with that the longest,” she said.
Straub said getting to do the La Quinta festival at home with her husband is a special opportunity.
“It’s in the heart of the city,” she said. “it’s a beautiful rolling grass park with lakes and waterfalls, and it’s a very beautiful setting. That’s going to be really nice. We do several Southern California festivals, but we don’t tour across the country (anymore). La Quinta, it’s a very hard festival to get into. … We’re both very fortunate that we’re both in the festival.”
The La Quinta Art Celebration will take place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 27, through Sunday, March 2, at the La Quinta Civic Center, 78495 Calle Tampico. One-day tickets are $25; a multi-day pass, valid all four days, is $30. For tickets or more information, visit www.laquintaartcelebration.org.
I love it!
Excellent story! Maybe I’m biased, but this is really good work.