SEA CHANGE officially opens

Please join me in celebrating a new exhibit at Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara. It’s been 5 years since my last solo show and I’m returning to the subject of a perpetual obsession, the pacific ocean. After the many months pummeled by news of the world and forced seclusion, I offer you color and vast horizons.

The First Thursday reception has been cancelled for August but don’t let that stop you from the respite that the show can offer, a traveling armchair, a breeze blowing onshore, sunshine radiating from the work.

A catalog for the show is also in the works, look for it mid month.

With hopes of seeing you around the gallery, be well, stay safe and let joy find you outside in the sun.

Gallery walls, Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara

CATALOG EXCERPT:

SEA CHANGE: a profound or notable transformation, substantial change in perspective, transformation after undergoing various trials or tragedies. 

This body of work emerged after the long months of quarantine. We can all agree that the year 2020 altered the way we see and experience the world, a noticeable change in our work patterns, change in our socializations, change in emotional atmosphere.  

During the long seclusion I spent my time combing through old source material for inspiration. Reexamining photographs, I tried to recall the “aha” moment that captured my attention. Looking more closely at these images I was reminded how much information the camera records verses what our eyes are capable of seeing. I question how this influences my work in the studio, the actual verses the recorded, the recorded verses the perceived, all woven into the personal dialog with my materials.

This work represents healing in the making of marks, solace also comes to mind and growth after a long winter. The uncertainty of this past year is veiled as horizons beckon us forward, the passing clouds offer comfort and respite that the storm is moving on, leaving the glorious remains of being washed clean and full of hope.

SEA CHANGE catalog coming soon!

BLOOM at Sullivan Goss

BLOOM will be part of SEA CHANGE opening a week from today at Sullivan Goss. Hope to see you all around the gallery.

Palette to Panel

Every day alchemy

details of new work with mixed color on palette

Ode to the Pacific

I’m in the final stretch of creating a new show for Sullivan Goss that will open at the end of July. The weeks are ticking away.

I fell in love with the color charts I was making last year and it has influenced the new paintings. I was looking for light and joy in the confines of the quarantine.

Summer Salon at Sullivan Goss

I love to be hanging with friends and beloved colleagues.

Coastal Fog can be viewed now at Sullivan Goss through July 26, 2021 beside the works of John Nava, Nathan Huff, Patricia Chidlaw, Phoebe Brunner, Angela Perko, Colin Campbell Cooper, Lockwood DeForest and many more.

Left to right, Nathan Huff “A Sudden Lurch to Help”, Angela Perko “Refugio Beach, West End #2”, Nicole Strasburg “Coastal Fog” and John Nava “Summerland 4-2”.

January Passing Storm

January Passing Storm installed in its new home in Santa Barbara. It’s always wonderful to see work placed in such beautiful environments. The paintings sing in a new way when they move from the studio into living spaces.

Save the Date - Summer 2021

Sullivan Goss will be hosting my first solo show in 5 years this Summer. I know! right?! Where did the time go? I’m sure some of you remember The River’s Journey, a huge endeavor and project that resulted in 4 individual exhibits spanning from February 2018 through June 2019. I was preoccupied and absorbed and then, you know, life happens. It’s not that I haven’t been working but other things needed tending and now my studio is bursting. I look forward to sharing new work again and I’m sure by the summer there will be several shows worth. Good luck to Susan sorting and finding the show within the piles.

Wintering .... there is beautiful art to be seen.

Winter Salon at Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara

February Storm Quad, 29.5x78” Oil on Birch panel

Sullivan Goss presents a curated selection of pieces from our inventory and recent acquistions.

February 5th through March 22, 2021 at Sullivan Goss

11 East Anapamu, Santa Barbara

open every day from 10-530

Peace & Quiet @ Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara

Press release from the gallery:

Sullivan Goss is pleased to offer an exhibition devoted to quietude for the new year. Battered by the pandemic, a hotly contested election, and an atmosphere marked by dread and hysteria, Gallery curators felt that the world could use a space for peace and contemplation. Drawing from its artists’ studios, collector consignments, and its own treasure vault, Sullivan Goss was able to assemble sixteen works spanning from 1890 to today that invite a meditative or peaceful state of mind. Installed with ample breathing room in the Gallery’s largest exhibition space, Sullivan Goss hopes to offer a refuge to weary artists, collectors, and visitors.

Each work has been carefully selected both to typify the artist’s best work and to help viewers slip away into reverie. Stylistically, the works range from late 19th and early 20th century Tonalist and Impressionist evocations by National Academicians Leon Dabo (1864-1960), Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932), and Colin Campbell Cooper to midcentury and contemporary “spacey” abstractions by William Dole (1917-1983) and Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) to contemporary Tonalist and abstract works by Gallery stalwarts like Whitney Brooks Abbott, Meredith Brooks Abbott, Ken Bortolazzo, Susan McDonnell, Chris Peters, Nicole Strasburg, and Sarah Vedder. 

Art can be an effective emotional trigger. High contrast works with bright, hyper-saturated colors and dynamic compositions can excite us – stimulating increased energy and mental activity. Paintings and drawings that use a more restrained and harmonized palette or whose imagery and compositions invoke the pastoral or the dreamy have the opposite effect. They calm us. They soothe. Those in search of peace & quiet are hereby advised: you’ll find it at 11 East Anapamu Street for the months of January and February.

Morning Estuary, 48x24”, Oil on Birch Panel

Holiday Gallery Cheer

If you are looking for some much needed peace and beauty Sullivan Goss has three terrific shows on the walls now and the doors are open to visitors. 100 Grand, the annual celebration of local art in small format, still has plenty of precious gems awaiting homes. And in the back room is the Winter Salon which features many new works by the gallery’s stable of artists. Tomorrow we are expecting the first rain of winter, what a great way to spend some time if you can’t be outside!

Works by Nicole Strasburg, Ken Bortalazzo and Patricia Chidlaw

Coastal Magic

A warm and hopeful wish this season for a prosperous new year. May we all find peace and joy while we wait for a vaccine that will restore us to a modicum of normalcy after almost a year of uncertainty.

I seek daily to find moments of glory, joy, peace and magic. Today without the gatherings of friends and family, the sharing of meals and stories of Christmases past I decided to seek warmth from nature. This time of year always holds the promise of a low tide and beautiful skies at the shoreline. Today was glorious and I was reunited with an old friend that I have not seen in a few years.

In 2007 I painted Morning Tide, an image from our local point during a minus tide. The sand recedes during the extreme winter tides revealing amazing rock formations. This one appeared looking like a lone dinosaur with it’s young on a beautiful morning beach walk. I was elated today to rediscover my friend waiting for me in the December tideline.

It wasn’t a hug from family or friends but it was a wonderful connection that reminded me of home, someone waiting to welcome me, the familiar that leads you to believing that everything is going to be okay.

Blessings and gratitude to friends and family near and far. May you all find the magic in the small moments this holiday.

Campus Point, Low Tide, December 25, 2020

La Paloma Cafe, Santa Barbara, California

Despite the current state of the State of California and the rolling shut downs, a new restaurant has been born, La Paloma Cafe. Words from their own website:

"We welcome you back in time, back in Santa Barbara history, back to La Paloma! After 37 years "the dove" will once again take wing on the iconic corner of Anacapa and Ortega. And like an old friend, the celebrated neon sign will once again state the original letters: La Paloma Cafe. Early in Santa Barbara's history, Ortega Street was "restaurant row" and a hub of activity. Opened in 1938, La Paloma Cafe was the premier Mexican restaurant on the strip and was frequented by stage and screen stars. During Old Spanish Days, vaqueros and cattlemen tied their horses in front of the corner bar building to wet their whistles. The old main house and patio buzzed with energy day and night where locals enjoyed the Luera family's hospitality delivered"

The new owners at Acme Hospitality have given the space a fresh clean face lift and added a second deck for outdoor dining (complete with heat lamps). The interior is spare and beautiful and many of my landscape paintings adorn the walls.

More on the restaurant HERE and to order take out check the MENU.

January Tide 40x40” oil on birch panel

Commission Installation - just in time for the holidays

Pacific Coast Fog 60x36” was recently finished and installed into the home of a happy client. They had been looking for the perfect something for this location and when they found it the painting was just too small. We figured out the perfect size and recallibrated the image for the new dimensions and zhuzhed up the color. Happy holidays from Santa Barbara.

Pacific Coast Fog 60x36”, oil on birch panel ©2020

100 GRAND @ Sullivan Goss

It is that amazing time of year again when Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara puts on the annual 100 GRAND show. Gathering their stable of artists and a slew of local talent it is always the show not to be missed. It is a great opportunity to see work from new artists and find work from artists you love at an affordable grab. Start your collection or add to a growing one.

My contribution is a trio of gouache paintings representing a koi pond visited on the island of Oahu.

A merry start to the holiday for all. Be well. Stay safe.

Allegro 3.75x4” gouache on arches board frame to 13x11”

Animato, 3.75x4” gouache on arches board

Con Brio, 3.75x4” gouache on arches board

Summer Salon at Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara

The Summer Salon at Sullivan Goss has officially opened. The exhibition will run through August 31, 2020. The gallery is open to stop by however better to make an appointment and have the 3 galleries to yourself to peruse all the new shows on the wall.

Road to Water Canyon Beach, Santa Rosa Island (22x17.5” oil on panel) on display with Ken Bortolazzo, Joseph Goldyne, Eric Beltz, and Will Simons.