Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ January 16-31
William Haskell’s avidly collected magical realist scenes of the desert Southwest—in his recognizable style but also showing inspiration from such past greats as Thomas Hart Benton, Salvador Dalí and Ed Mell—possess a near-hypnotic sense of pulsing energy and enthralling depth. They are a result of the artist’s labor-intensive creative process. “Each of his paintings requires a multitude of painstakingly long steps,” observes Dr. Mark Sublette, founder and owner of Medicine Man Gallery.
Sublette is referring to Haskell’s dry-brush acrylic technique, in which the artist may apply as many as 40 layers of paint to a canvas, endowing the final image with depth and texture. He says, “Bill needs a year to work on the show, and this is the one time of year that collectors will have to see a lot of his work.” This exhibition, titled Visions of the Sacred Desert, opens with an artist reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, January 16.
Based in New Mexico, Haskell explores scenes both familiar and new in the dozen or so paintings on view. Included among them are such long-admired subjects as prickly pear cacti, featured in ASCENSION OF THE DESERT SOUL amidst a backdrop of weathered mesas and towering clouds. Another work portrays a subject the artist only tackled for the first time a year or so ago: a tornado, inspired by those he recalls from his boyhood in the Midwest. Entirely new in this show is the artist’s first rendering of a Joshua tree, shown against the distinctive Southern California backdrop of Joshua Tree National Park’s craggy outcroppings in a piece titled TREE OF THE TIMELESS DESERT.
Before applying a first layer of paint to any of his works, Haskell begins, not with acrylics, brushes and canvas, but with pencil and paper. “I make a lot of graphite drawings for the purpose of creating the finished painting,” he explains. “But I take some of them and complete them in a way that makes them finished pieces of art in themselves.” In addition to the artworks that resulted from such meticulous planning, this new show also includes four of these graphite-and-paper artworks.
Sublette takes pleasure in the fact that the 2026 outing from Haskell coincides with the final weeks of the exhibition Icons of the West, at his Maynard Dixon & Native American Art Museum, which juxtaposes paintings by Maynard Dixon and Ed Mell. What more felicitous context could there be for the latest, long-anticipated works from another star of the region? —Norman Kolpas
contact information(520) 722-7798medicinemangallery.com
This story appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.
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