LIke most art collectors, the Nicholsons – Sandi and Bill – are interesting people. What makes them fascinating is the nature of their collection: All of the work is by women artists.

Monday, July 8, 2019, was the last day to view a collection of landscape painter Ray Strong’s work at the Wildling Museum in Santa Ynez Valley, the day coincidentally, I sat with Patricia Chidlaw in her studio to talk about painting.

Nathan Huff's paintings and sculptures are made of recognizable objects – boats, sails, trees, rocks – but combined in a dream-like way where all defy gravity and encourage you to do so, too. In his solo show "The Stories We Tell Ourselves," Huff brings a selection of works since he arrived in town to teach at Westmont in 2013.

ENGAGINGLY FAMILIAR, YET TEAMING WITH OFF THE WALL DYNAMICS, Nathan Huff: The Stories We Tell Ourselves will be center stage at Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery's 1st Thursday on August 1st from 5 to 8pm. 

Barring any unknown knowns and known unknowns, our current most vital exhibition happening this summer is Inga Guzyte's "#rebelwomen" solo show at Sullivan Goss (11 E. Anapamu). And I'm not just hyping it because I wrote a cover story on her for Montecito Journal (cough, cough), but seriously, Guzyte is about to blow up big time, much like her friend David Flores.

Using recycled skateboard decks as her medium, Inga Guzyte (ingaguzyte.com) transforms her passion for skateboarding into sculptural art. Her new #RebelWomen series spotlights women from around the globe - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yousafzai, Frida Kahlo - emphaszing their strength, courage, fearlessness, and wit.

Artist Inga Guzyte is lucky. She's been able to turn her three obsessions – skateboarding, art, and woodworking – into a career that is growing step by giant step.

#REBELWOMEN: Celebrates the World's Strongest Women at her upcoming art exhibition at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, California, starting June 1st.

How? That's the recurring question attending Inga Guzyte's upcoming exhibition at Sullivan Goss. How did a girl born in communist Lithuania end up in Santa Barbara? How did an exhibition full of shredded skateboards end up on the walls of a gallery known for historic American paintings? How on Earth does Inga Guzyte make these things?

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS INFUSED WITH COURAGE… FRESH, EDGY, UNUSUAL. That’s contemporary art when Inga Guzyte is on the creating end. Born in Lithuania, raised in Germany, passionate about skateboarding and creating, and recently returned from time in New York and Europe, she will be opening her first solo exhibition with Sullivan Goss An American Gallery in June.

Dressed in sawdust-coated sneakers and a wide brim fedora, artist INGA GUZYTE can't help but smile at the stacks of old skateboard decks towering over her tiny studio space. "It's definitely time for a bigger workshop," she laughs, before adding: "I know it just looks like piles of old boards, but each one has such a unique story to tell."

This spring in Santa Barbara, with wildflower-tripping and resplendent natural color palettes on the collective mind, painter Hank Pitcher’s latest exhibition at Sullivan Goss is right on time, and all about place.

Wondering how AI can inspire artists to create their best work? Renowned artist Chris Peters recently purchased a new NVIDIA TITAN RTX GPU with the intention of using it to create art. The results are stunning compositions generated by the AI, and actual oil paintings painted by Peters himself.

"Whatever's going on in the world ends up in your work. I like the idea of painters being witnesses – of showing truth as it is. I like painters being able to develop and discover an image of who we are." This is how Hank Pitcher describes the intention behind his latest work, an exhilerating and career-defining series that's now on view at Sullivan Goss in a show called Primal.

Training algorithms to generate art is, in some ways, the easy part. You feed them data, they look for patterns, and they do their best to replicate what they’ve seen. But like all automatons, AI systems are tireless and produce a never-ending stream of images. The tricky part, says German AI artist Mario Klingemann, is knowing what to do with it all.

Chris Peters, an artist who emerged out of the Pop Surrealist movement, has used A.I. in a new way to create paintings of landscapes that don’t actually exist. Using an algorithm “capable of ‘learning’ and ‘predicting,'” Peters fed the system a trove of curated landscape paintings. Soon, the A.I. was able to produce new digital images, and after processing and curating those landscapes, Peters painted his favorites in oil.

THE TALENT AND EXPERTISE OF WESTMONT COLLEGE'S art department faculty are illuminated in Sullivan Goss' latest exhibition Mentors and Makers. Showcasing the work of six artists and mentors from different media and backgrounds, the exhibition is a dazzling revue of some of Santa Barbara's most interesting creators.

Sullivan Goss [SG] opens its doors annually in December with its 100 Grand exhibit specifically to show works from only local artists, comprised of veteran professional locals and newbies. The concept is to price the art at $1,000 or less and keep the overall size minimalist, in a mission to encourage people with lesser budgets to own a work of art.

"I look for microbubbles, that lie among the wheat, and bake them into mutton-pies and sell them in the street," to misquote Lewis Carroll. I've always wondered why the Walrus didn't mention microbubbles as well. He certainly didn't mind talking of those other things, like shoes, and ships and sealing wax. Whenever I see an exhibition of Assemblage Art, it puts me in the mind of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland.

This is one of the internet's top 100 Tumblrs according to pretty much everyone on the internet.

For centuries, the compass rose has served as a directional tool. ROSE COMPASS, a group of six women from Santa Barbara County (Connie Connally, Holli Harmon, Libby Smith, Nicole Strasburg, Nina Warner, and Pamela Zwehl-Burke) is charting a path to increase environmental awareness through art.

If you happen to travel to Africa, specifically to Equatorial Guinea or the Republic of Namibia, and visit their respective American embassies, you will see, prominently displayed, the work of Santa Barbara artist Phoebe Brunner, courtesy of the Art in the Embassies Program.

Following two days of much-needed rain, the sun came through for October's 1st Thursday art walk, humming with crowded streets, galleries, and clubs. The art headliner was the Sullivan Goss Gallery exhibit trying the history of assemblage art in Santa Barbara from 1956-2018, aptly titled THE RED-HEADED STEPCHILD and curated by art historian and Gallery director of Sullivan Goss Jeremy Tessmer.

Amid the bustle of 1st Thursday in downtown Santa Barbara, friends and family slowly trickled into the Sullivan Goss Gallery to see the latest show titled “The Red-Headed Stepchild.”.

The show celebrates local artists who embrace the idea of taking the old and unwanted, and transforming it into something beautiful.

Sullivan Goss (11 E. Anapamu) hosts an important exhibition in October titled “The Red Headed Step-child: The History of Collage and Assemblage in Santa Barbara 1955-2018,” running through Sunday, October 14, and with a reception on Thursday, October 4.

Transforming upper State Street into a hub for visual art and creativity, many downtown venues will be joining forces to become the Santa Barbara Art District. The galleries, stretching from Sola to Figueroa Streets, will each be hosting opening receptions during 1st Thursday, October 4th from 5-8pm. 

Collage and assemblage is an art form often overlooked as fine art and is instead considered child’s play. This is how artist Sue Van Horsen and Sullivan Goss curator Jeremy Tessmer came up with the title for this exhibition.

“Yeah, we’re like the red-headed stepchild,” she says, as she explains how assemblage artists get invited to gatherings in the Santa Barbara art world only to be seated at the kid’s table.

This delightful show of five artists sharing a common interest is the product of curator Susan Bush’s observation that when it comes to eco-consciousness among contemporary artists, there’s something special about bears. Adonna Khare, Beth Van Hoesen, Susan McDonnell, Pamela Kendall Schiffer, and Nicole Strasburg may all have started out expressing their fascination with these extraordinary animals independently, but encountering the work together, the viewer is left with no choice but to accept that there’s now a distinct bear area in art.

Landscape and animal paintings are tough. Not tough to digest, but tough to review. Like portraits and landscapes, animal paintings are what they are—they depict, though not necessarily through ideas. They are meant to look a certain way. Mostly they are meant to entice a viewer by technique, use of color, or style.

Ask any witness about the devastation wrought by the Montecito mudslides, and there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll hear a description of the mud itself: the “big stewing soup of it,” as T.C. Boyle memorably put in his short story “I Walk Between the Raindrops” in the July 30 issue of the New Yorker. In Phoenix Rising, the new exhibit at Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery (11 E. Anapamu St.), ceramic artists James and Linda Haggerty are asking us all to take another look at the mud and ash distributed by January’s debris flow, but not because they want to take us back to the scene of the disaster; instead, they want to imagine a way forward.

A few years ago, Sullivan Goss curator Susan Bush began to notice the number of artists regularly depicting bears in their works. Artists had begun to choose bears as their subject matter not only to show the profound beauty of the animal but also to raise awareness to their fragile existence and habitat in North America.

The Contemporary Bear Area Artists exhibition aims to showcase the majestic North American bear while informing visitors of the effects that a growing human population, climate change and changes in hunting regulations have on bears.