1960s Eleanor Hurst California Plein Air Painting of Spanish Mission with Mountainous Desert Landscape

Description

Martha Eleanor Nicholson Hurst aka Eleanor Hurst or E Hurst California
Plein Air Painting of a Spanish Mission nestled in … more Martha Eleanor Nicholson Hurst aka Eleanor Hurst or E Hurst California
Plein Air Painting of a Spanish Mission nestled in the foothills.

A rare painting with great interest and beauty.
Eleanor Hurst is one of those names that haunts the margins of the Smoketree School. Collectors would hear of her in connection to Borrego artists, and now and then someone would say they’d found an exceptional Hurst painting.

Now you can be that someone.... the owner of an exceptional and rare Hurst painting!

This painting is undated, possibly mid century, in what may possibly be it's original frame: linen-like fabric on a simple inexpensive wood frame.
Artwork:

8 X 10” masonite board - no writing on back
10 X 12” frame
Eleanor Nicholson Hurst was born in Cambridge, OH on April 10, 1913. She studied with Andrew Wyeth and continued with Olaf Wieghorst while living in Sedona, Arizona.

After her marriage to wood sculptor, Ronald C. Hurst, she moved to southern California and continued her art studies with John Hilton.

After settling in San Diego County, she lived in La Mesa and El Cajon until the death of her husband in 1980. She then moved north to Yountville in Napa County.

She died there on May 5, 1988. Her rare landscapes are mostly of the back country of San Diego County.



More of Eleanor Hurst’s story, in part, as shared by her son, Ron.
She was born in Ohio in 1913 and studied with Andrew Wyeth—along with Olaf Wieghorst, John Hilton, Ted De Grazia and Gare Barks (wife of Donald Duck creator Carl Barks). She married Ron Hurst, a woodcarver, and they settled in La Mesa and El Cajon. Ron senior was a desert rat who operated a steam shovel for the railroad, and later went on to work as an engineer on the Atlas Missile Program.

The weekend ritual of her son, Ron Hurst’s youth, involved driving from La Mesa through the San Diego backcountry to the Borrego Desert, where he and his parents would head down a dirt road and make camp. His mother would set up her easel and he and his father would go off to practice tracking and rockhounding. While raising her son, Eleanor showed her paintings in Borrego Springs galleries and with the La Jolla Art Association and the Desert Art Center. When Ron came home from school each day she’d whisk him into her studio to show him what she’d been working on: “Look at this, look at this.”

“She knew Olaf Wieghorst well and showed with him in El Cajon,” he says. “She showed and swapped paintings with Ted DeGrazia [the charismatic Tucson artist]. Mom studied with John Hilton and told me the sad story of him losing his sight in his later years. She was in love with his sand dune technique and of course–as you can see–his smoke trees.

”

She worked mostly on masonite; her favorite subject was the San Diego backcountry from Julian to Borrego. The only hitch in her career as a desert painter was a desperate fear of snakes. During one class, she told the instructor that every time she backed up to look at her painting from a distance she heard a funny noise. “Upon closer examination,” Ron says, “the instructor discovered a large diamondback rattlesnake coiled up in the shade of the bush.”

The family also lived in Sedona for a time, at the base of Coffee Pot Rock, where Eleanor was acquainted with Western artist Frank McCarthy. “Both Mom and Dad worked for Don Hoel in his phenomenal jewelry shop there,” Ron says.


At age 66, Ron has just started his own journey back to the desert. “I have so many memories of Borrego as a child,” he says. “For awhile, it seemed like we lived there because Mom would want to go every weekend—even in the summer.”



While learning all about obsidian, jasper and quartz, young Ron also unknowingly absorbed the texture and light of the desert. He was learning via the eyes of his mother, the desert painter Martha Eleanor Nicholson Hurst (she went by Eleanor Hurst). That buried knowledge came back to Ron recently as he embarked on his own career capturing the desert in painterly photographs.

“I had no idea I had learned some of this through osmosis,” says Ron. “It’s my mother who gave me the ability to see.”



Ron recognized he didn’t have the painting chops of his mother but he knew what a desert painting should look like. Following the back roads of his youth, he studied Old Rain in the Face (Indianhead peak) and Font’s point just as his mother did. He takes photographs and uses digital technique to add texture and brush strokes. The results—looking something like the old colorized postcards–achieve the atmospheric range of his mother's paintings.
Eleanor Hurst is one of those names that haunts the margins of the Smoketree School. Collectors would hear of her in connection to Borrego artists, and now and then someone would say they’d found an exceptional Hurst painting.

Now you can be that someone.... the owner of an exceptional Hurst painting! less