by Laura Read

Homestead Magazine 

Early in the morning in La Quinta, California, a few doves coo along Avenida Ramirez, and in the closet-sized kitchen of Larry and Nancy Cush’s 1936 home, Larry pours himself a cup of dark French roast. He exits the kitchen into his backyard, where he is not surrounded by trimmed bushes, synchronized flowerbeds and a kidney-shaped pool. Those are the predictable accoutrements of gated golf communities now covering much of Southern California’s Coachella Valley.

There isn’t much that is orderly about the world Larry and Nancy Cush have created for themselves. They live in one of the oldest residential parts of La Quinta, a neighborhood called The Cove named for an alluvial fan surrounded by mountains, where they make a living producing sculptures and hand-painted tile murals for private homes and public spaces. The Cushes love serendipity, the beauty of irregularity and the surprises of nature. In contrast to the manicured communities around them, their landscaping is in delightful disorder, and it kindles their creativity.  

The backyard is a wonderland of plants and art — most of it hand-crafted; none of it predictable.

“What would you call this,” Larry says, surveying the yard, “desert grunge?”

Across their two adjoining lots thrive 50 trees and shrubs, including Washington palms, ubiquitous in the region, as well as Meyer lemon, tangelo, blood orange and banana trees. There’s a vegetable garden and a trellis-covered hot tub. A small trailer is outfitted as a guesthouse. What really emboldens the space, though, is a collection of murals, tile work and mixed media sculpture. There’s a 12-foot-high foam Academy Awards statue painted in gold, a set of foam-core and cement obelisks painted like psychedelic barrel cacti, and a huge cement-and-paper mask fitted with green-glass eyeballs.

“We do struggle a bit with structure,” admits Nancy. “It’s hard for us to fit into any kind of box. Here we can kick back and have fun.”

The Cush’s 1,200 square-foot house is a work of art, too. It is one of 63 similar adobe-style “casitas” built 80 years ago when L.A. vacationers discovered the delicious heat and beauty of Coachella Valley. Some original handmade roof tiles are still in place.

The yard’s pièce de résistance is an 8-foot-tall wood-burning pizza oven built by Larry seven years ago. The project was a sort of therapy for Larry, who suffered a brain tumor that damaged some nerves and left him deaf in one ear.

“He was just so happy he survived the surgery that he decided he was going to dive into something,” Nancy says.

It’s the kind of art that gives back, Larry says. “People love being here for pizza in the outdoors.” The secret to good pizza crust is to bake it without toppings first, making it firm and crispy, he says. “My favorite is when we bake the crust with garlic and salt, and then put tomatoes and basil on it, and drizzle it with olive oil. That’s really good.”

In the Cush spirit of experimentation, dinner guests bring unplanned toppings, which make for some pretty unusual pizzas, Nancy says.

This morning, Larry, 65, will put off finishing a shower tiling project he started last week at a client’s home down the street. Instead, he’ll work in his “man cave” studio on a floor-to-ceiling glass panel that will be etched with silicon carbide in a modern abstract design.

Meanwhile, Nancy, 56, works in her own studio inside the property’s 1950s garage. Her well-lit space is stacked with tile samples, drawings and photos. On the floor, the Cush’s fluffy dog, Griffin, (part Maltese, part who-knows-what) shows off a roll over. Nancy is painting a desert scene across a matrix of pre-fired 4x4 tiles. Yesterday she traced the design onto the bisque tiles with a pencil. Today she’s outlining the forms with “resist,” which will separate the other glaze colors so they don’t run together in the kiln.

“When I paint, I’m not 100 percent sure of how the finished design will look until it’s out of the kiln,” Nancy says. “The color that will be blue on the finished tile is actually this color in the bottle.” She holds up a plastic container marked “Ginger Blue.” It looks filled with something rusty brown.

La Quinta and the nearby communities of Indian Wells, Palm Springs and other towns are supportive of artists like the Cushes. Each town has an art festival, and some have annual studio tours. Nancy’s murals decorate walls in a La Quinta coffee shop as well as the town square. Cush Art Studios work is in private homes all over southern California and Hawaii. Larry’s sculptures are in La Quinta’s Civic Center Park, and in other public spaces. An arch of his metal California poppies forms a portal in a La Quinta shopping mall. For the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the couple created massive casted-concrete tables topped with tile murals. They are waiting to hear if they’ve been approved this year to make a $60,000, 54-foot-long mural for the Coachella Valley Water District.

Although they both enjoy commissions, outside of that work, Larry needs room for freedom.

“I bounce around,” Larry says. “I work on this for a while, then work on something else.” His man cave is filled with works in progress, including a series of metal sculptures colored with chemical patinas, and another glass panel etched with a Cape buffalo. He’s constantly experimenting.

They both get ideas from the broad Coachella Valley, which eons ago existed a giant body of water called Lake Cahuilla. Shoreline wave marks still rib the mountainsides. A part of the Sonoran Desert, Coachella Valley is surrounded by stark hills and rugged mountain peaks. In summer, temperatures soar above 110. In certain canyons, you can find palm oases hosting waterfalls and pools. It’s nearly magical.

That is where the Cushes go for inspiration.

One morning, they hike into Andreas Canyon, an oasis maintained by the Cahuilla Indians. Nancy perches on a rock in the middle of the creek while Larry photographs ferns and cattails. A lizard scurries across the path. The canyon feels as far away from the desert as the sun does from the moon.

“I love it here,” Nancy says. She takes off her shoes and dips her bare feet into the icy water.

This was where the Cahuilla Indians used to gather, Larry says. A community grinding rock still anchors the canyon’s entrance.

The two artists are quiet for a time, until Larry says, “My whole life revolves around moments in time when I see something in nature and I want to remember it and show it to other people in different ways.”

Their time together seems designed (or rather, undersigned) to conjure up just such instances. “There’s a Buddhist concept that calls for being present in the moment,” Nancy says. “We’ve been in these canyons many times, with many different people, but each time is different. I’ve never sat at this spot here. It is a totally new experience.”

That brings to Larry’s mind a story. “A long time ago on the coast of Washington I worked with a Quinault Indian basket weaver, Grandma Black,” he says. “She had a rock she would use in the baskets when she was working on them. When I asked her about it, she told me, ‘Oh that’s just an old rock. I’ve had it since I was a little girl.’ She was in her 70s or 80s then, so it wasn’t just any old rock; it really meant something to her.”

He pauses, and his story suddenly blooms into a grander concept. “I think that’s how artists are. We find things that mean something to us and try to figure it out. Sometimes we do.”