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Strasburg Studio Archives: Rediscovery in the Stacks

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N O I S E R E D U C T I O N

Oct/Nov SPOTLIGHT : "SURGE"
35.5 x 35.5", oil on birch panel, 2021.

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Thank you for joining me on this monthly trip through the archives of my studio.

Here we are, approaching the eleventh month of the year twenty twenty-five, and I’m still in something of a muddle. It’s been one of the biggest challenges this year, navigating the news of our threatened democracy while keeping focus on my own sphere of influence and working towards shedding the rest. It doesn’t feel like I’m succeeding. Most days I can feel the low ebb of my spirits, a quiet fatigue that hums beneath the surface.

So how do we tune out the noise, calm our system and decipher what is important?

When I thought about it, this is exactly what I’m thinking when composing a new image. What in this subject compels me—what pulse or shimmer insists on being seen? How much, or how little, information is needed to carry that emotion to the viewer? It’s an act of distillation, a practice of clarity, and perhaps that’s the work—at the easel and in life alike.

This month’s spotlight, Surge, was a painting made for SEA CHANGE, my first post-Covid exhibition at Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara. The long quiet of quarantine offered opportunity to look deeper into my subject - the sea, the sky, the horizon. Surge was one of the last pieces in that series, a study in restraint and presence: the pared-down rhythm of wave and shoreline, the subtle shifts in color held against hard edges. Sitting somewhere between impressionism and abstraction, it captures both the movement and stillness of the tide itself.

Perhaps, in the end, my muddle isn’t something to escape but to inhabit—the inevitable part of the process of finding my way. Like paint layered and reworked, meaning emerges slowly, in its own time, through patience and persistence. Pentimento traces the journey itself—revealing what endures and quietly concealing what no longer serves.

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Something you may not know about this painting just by looking at it- it has had a rich life and logged many travel miles during its four year life span. Starting in Santa Barbara with the debut in Sea Change, Surge then spent several months in 2023 living in Carmel before being included in three Art Fairs this year-one in Arizona, then San Francisco and lastly Seattle- before returning home to the studio.