Landscape painter Berla Iyone Emeree was born August 7, 1899 in Wichita, Kansas, but after 1907, grew up in El Paso, Texas. At age seventeen, she studied in Philadelphia with Frank Benton Ashley Linton and Michael Jacobs, and in Texas she was a student of Jose Arpa, Xavier Gonzalez, and Rolla Taylor.

She was an adventurous, independent woman, fearless in her travels alone by car to possible painting sites, where she would camp out. Emeree paid her expenses on a painting trip through Arizona in 1934 by selling or exchanging her pictures for gasoline. Painting the Grand Canyon and Granite Dells near Prescott, Emeree got lost in a desolate area of the state and had to be rescued.

But that was her independent nature. As a seven-...