“This is my church, my heart,” Nicole Strasburg says of her painting studio, adding, “I’m not a very good plein-air painter, I have no focus for painting when I’m out in the open air.”
Near the ocean, facing east to catch the morning sunrise, Strasburg and her husband have built a tidy freestanding studio. It’s small, yet big enough to fit a large wall for display, counters, storage, islands on rollers, easels and tons of inspiration – including the memories and sensations she brings in from the outside, plein-air world.
Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery will present its latest exhibit, “Paper Trail: The Life Story of Great Works of Art,” Aug. 27-Oct. 25.
“Paper Trail” explores how art moves through the world and across time.
The exhibit will feature historical and modern works that have been made in important ateliers, owned by important art world figures, exhibited in museums and/or published in magazines or catalogs, according to a news release.
SANTA BARBARA — Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery has announced “Sea Change,” artist Nicole Strasburg’s first solo exhibit in five years.
The show is set for July 30 to Sept. 27 at the gallery, located at 11 E. Anapamu St.
The opening reception will take place 5 to 8 p.m. Aug. 5 during 1st Thursday.
“In the past few years, she has been avidly exploring new ways of approaching color, examining the sky, rendering clouds, and mapping the ocean in all of its many moods. The result is an exhibition full of the shape and wonder of Nature doing its thing,” the Santa Barbara gallery said in a news release.
Beyond the standard art historical idea of a school or a movement lies the territory suggested by significant aesthetic trends that seemingly exceed conscious intention. ORGANIC, the current show at Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, offers a snapshot of one such sprawling and manifold tendency in contemporary art. “Organic,” one of the 21st century’s most popular (and unreliable) words, refers in this case to the blurring of boundaries and the celebration of overlaps between art objects and the shapes and materials of the natural world.
Now what?
Lynda Weinman never had to ask the question after she and her husband Bruce Heavin, sold their company, lynda.com, an online software training website, to Linkedin in 2015.
She knew exactly what she wanted to do.
“While I was in high school, I loved to spend all my spare time making pottery. So one of the first things I did was take a ceramics class at Adult Ed,” Ms. Weinman told the News-Press. “But I didn’t like it. It was too crowded. I couldn’t get the individual attention I needed.”
The painter and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger has long been a well-kept secret of the midcentury Southern California modern-art scene—itself a rather well-kept secret of the American art world in general. The German-born artist, who was active in Los Angeles from the 1930s through the 1960s, made abstract paintings in the European “non-objective” tradition of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, but his greatest passion was for abstract film, a genre that he had a large part in inventing.
Early morning, late summer, three painters scout for a coastal painting view. Several locations are considered. One of the painters, Hank Pitcher, chimes in with a smile: “I don’t care where it is so long as there’s water in it.” To beat the sunrise, they choose a pasture close by occupied by several large bulls.
Water indeed. As a swimmer needs a pool, Hank Pitcher needs an ocean, as evidenced by recent paintings on view at Sullivan Goss Gallery.
SUN KISSED SURFBOARDS AND SURFS-UP SUNRISES define and illuminate the California dream which is embodied in the paintings of Hank Pitcher, now on display at Sullivan Goss. In at least his eleventh solo exhibit at the gallery, Pitcher focuses on the sense of "just now," perhaps a feeling many of us have experienced as time warped during a year of quiet and isolation brought on by social distancing.
Kindred Spirits, on view at Sullivan Goss through May 24, is a sculptural garden of earthly delights celebrating the collaborative ceramics made by Patrick Hall and Lynda Weinman. Each piece marries one of Hall’s elegant and symmetrical bases to a top section created by Weinman using computer-aided 3D modeling. While Hall’s vessels follow the venerable ceramic art tradition of vases and bowls, Weinman’s quirky contributions put a different spin on the idea, reimagining vessels that resemble the anatomical tubes that carry blood, or perhaps cephalopod tentacles, or even the stems of exotic plants.
A NEW KIND OF WHEEL TURNS THE CLAY OF THESE ARTISTS, challenging the galaxy with the melding of new and ancient arts, as the parched earth opens its arms to Patrick Hall & Lynda Weinman: Kindred Spirits and Maria Rendón: Rain, two new exhibitions recently opened at Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery.
A funny thing happened on the way to the reopening of downtown Santa Barbara following the COVID-19 crisis. For years, if not decades, Santa Barbara artists have lamented the fact that, despite a preponderance of distinguished fine art collections in the city’s proliferation of lavish domestic spaces, collectors have — with few exceptions — tended to purchase their art elsewhere. Now it seems that, along with what has been described as a significant backlog of unfilled orders for new furniture, there is something of a rush to collect art through Santa Barbara galleries and, in many instances, by Santa Barbara artists.
Case in point: Maria Rendón’s solo debut show at Sullivan Goss Gallery, Rain, which opened on Thursday, April 1, is well on its way to an 80 or even a 90 percent sell-through rate, with the largest (and most expensive) works promised to buyers before they hit the gallery walls.
As we count down the days until Santa Barbara reaches the red tier and museums open again, it’s a delight to relish the freedom to operate that pandemic quarantine rules have given to our city’s excellent art galleries. At Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, on Anapamu Street, visitors can catch two great shows featuring some of the top artists in our region, all of whom happen to be women. In the front room until March 22, there’s an exceptionally interesting show called Pattern Recognition that features three mid-career artists whose work takes decorative abstraction as a point of departure for innovative painting and printmaking. Although Julika Lackner’s geometric paintings bear a superficial relationship to mosaic and tile work, sustained attention reveals a sensibility rooted in the alchemy of texture and palette. The large, vertically oriented “Mountain of the Sun 8” from 2020 offers a spiritual vision that’s as uplifting as the chords of a gospel choir.
Coinciding with Women’s History Month in March, “Real Women: Realist Art by American Women” is on view through March 29 at Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St.
The works, which cover the last 90 years, feature drawing, oil painting, print-making and photography by local and regional artists along with national historical figures.
Among the artists in the exhibition are Susan McDonnell, Patricia Chidlaw, Leslie Lewis Sigler, Sarah Lamb and Dorothy Churchill-Johnson. Their works are shown here along with background information by Susan Bush, curator of contemporary art at the gallery.
The Wildling Museum of Art and Nature will give attendees a backstage look at its latest installations during “Art Through the Window: A Conversation with Holli Harmon & Nicole Strasburg.”
The virtual program is set for 4 to 5 p.m. March 24.
Because the museum can’t welcome guests inside just yet, it invited Ms. Harmon and Ms. Strasburg to create installations to be viewed from outside the Wildling’s windows, located at 1511-B Mission Drive in Solvang.
FACED WITH REAL LIFE EVERY DAY, women artists have a unique perspective, especially those focusing their art on the details of their experience.
A glance past the solemn wooden doors of Sullivan Goss Art Gallery reveals billowing clouds painted in innocent shades of pink, as if they were rising and sweetly erupting from the base of the painting. Haunted by the voices of Hiroshima, transparent rockets shoot skywards against the graphically inspired clouds in Yumiko Glover’s “Peacemaker III.”
Inside the galleries hushed white walls lives a new exhibition of paintings fervent in their bright colors and abstracted shapes. The works by Claudia Borfiga, Julika Lackner and Yumiko Glover featured in Pattern Recognition fall together like old acquaintances reunited.
A Central Coast museum has come up with a unique answer to the COVID-19 health safety orders which have kept it closed for most of the last year. The Wildling Museum of Art and Nature sits on Mission Drive, in Solvang. Unlike most museums, it has huge windows allowing you to look inside. So, they came up with an idea. Maybe people can’t go in, but they can look in.
The museum’s Assistant Director, Lauren Sharp, says the result is two art installations designed for viewing from windows.
The Sullivan Goss art gallery will feature art from female artists in an exhibition titled “Real Women: Realist Art by American Women,” which will be on display Feb. 26 through April 26 [incorrect in article].
The exhibition coincides with Women’s History Month and will feature works of realism in drawings, painting, print-making and photography.
American artist Susan McDonnell is a realist painter who paints her encounters of wildlife, and tells stories of nature through her paintings. She received 2nd prize in the INPRNT Traditional Art Category of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Award for her ‘Desert Guardians’ oil painting. While her work is clearly inspired by nature and animals, they are not simple studies of the animals she encounters.
Each piece Susan McDonnell has created includes a strong sense of storytelling.
With the country battered by the pandemic, a hotly contested election, the nation’s capitol invaded by rioters and an atmosphere marked by dread and hysteria, curators at Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery in downtown Santa Barbara felt this community could use a space for peace and contemplation.
Drawing from its artists’ studios, collector consignments and its own treasure vault, the gallery staff has assembled 16 works spanning from 1890 to today that invite a meditative or peaceful state of mind.
The exhibition is open for socially distant viewing through March 1. Gallery visits are limited to eight mask-wearing guests at a time. The exhibit is also available online.
Among the works at Sullivan Goss‘s “Peace & Quiet,” opening January 8, is this beautiful painting by Chris Peters.
You can start 2021 with some “Peace & Quiet.”
An exhibit devoted to quiet, contemplative works will be on display Jan. 8 through March 1 at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St.
The gallery is open for socially distance viewing. Visits are limited to eight mask-wearing guests at one time.
A FEAST FOR ART LOVERS and one of “Sullivan Goss’s most important exhibitions,” according to exhibition curator Jeremy Tessmer, Drewes/Fischinger/Gordin: The Invention of American Abstract Art has been extended to January 4th. This will give locals and visitors time to discover its sophisticated ensemble of pieces during our long winter holiday.
Comprised of work by three influential, though not universally known artists, the exhibition is the inaugural Sullivan Goss sampling from the Estates of Werner Drewes (1899-1985) and Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) in context with work from the Estate of Sidney Gordin (1918-1996).
Battered by the pandemic, a contentious election, and an atmosphere of alarm, curators at Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery in Santa Barbara felt the community could use a space for peace and contemplation.
Drawing from its artists' studios, collector consignments, and its own treasure vault, Sullivan Goss assembled 16 works spanning 1890 to today that invite a meditative or peaceful state of mind at its gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St. The show runs Jan. 8-March 1.
In a year gone topsy-turvy, one tradition has held fast at Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery on East Anapamu Street: the 12th annual “100 GRAND” exhibition and sale, featuring 108 quality works of art for $1,000 or less.
The event continues through Dec. 28.
“The exhibition has become an incubator of emerging talent, an entryway for beginning collectors, a holiday celebration in the art community and an ever timely reminder that everyone’s life is improved by the addition of original works of art,” said Susan Bush, contemporary curator at the gallery.
Sullivan Goss’ current exhibition The Invention of American Abstract Art, curated by Jeremy Tessmer, explores how abstract art materialized and evolved within the works of Werner Drewes (1899-1985), Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), and Sidney Gordin (1918-1996) after they moved to the United States. During the twentieth century, discoveries in quantum theory, relativity, and cosmic evolution largely shaped artistic attempts to conceptualize the human condition. Although it is widely attributed to its European inception, abstract art sustained formal developments when it spread to the United States in the later half of the twentieth century.
Santa Barbara and its environs offer a visual treasure trove of hidden gems. Small spaces of secret beauties, coves of elegance and broad vistas of graceful nature can be found by an inquisitive eye. One man has set these sights onto canvas with great expression. A lifelong resident, painter Hank Pitcher is a true product of his environment. His visual efforts are eloquent in the progression of art history and Plein Air painting.
STRONG, FLOWER CROWNED WOMEN. Mice figurines living in their own tiny worlds. Soaring skycaps above calm oceans. California landscapes hanging besides 60’s abstract works. This fall, visitors of Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery will be greeted with these delightful works and more as they explore The Green House and The San Francisco Fall Show exhibitions.
For four decades, dealers and patrons have been spoiled by the grandeur of the San Francisco Fall Show, from postcard views to the popping of Champagne bottles. This year, those extras will be shelved, but fortunately, fans can still expect a collector’s paradise of art, antiques and decor and — mais oui — revel in some retail therapy.
If this year’s event has revealed one thing, it’s the loyalty of the show’s longstanding dealers, with more than 90 percent of the stable partaking in the new format. Additionally, several dealers who haven’t exhibited at the show in more than a decade will be returning, including Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz, Sullivan Goss and Liz O’Brien. And exciting new vendors have been added to the lineup, including Barbara Israel Garden Antiques, Michael Goedhuis, Finch & Company, O’Sullivan Antiques, Philip Stites (formerly of Therien), Somerville Manning, the Chinese Porcelain Company and Ursus Books.
Santa Barbara has been a hotspot for tourism and travel ever since the early 20th century, when wealthy visitors would make their way to the “American Riviera” to take in its beautiful scenery, museums and galleries. When the pandemic hit, Santa Barbara virtually shut down, forcing these museums and showrooms to close their doors to the public until they were able to open up again safely. Now that Santa Barbara County has been placed into the lower-danger red tier, the restrictions have gotten thinner and people are yet again permitted to visit and enjoy some of the city’s favorite museums. ...
Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery
Another Santa Barbara gem that should be on everybody’s must-see list is the Sullivan Goss American Gallery. Located at 11 E. Anapamu St., the small showspace is currently allowing people in at a limited capacity and the admittance is free. Each piece is for sale, so if anything in particular strikes your eye don’t hesitate to inquire about it. The Sullivan Goss curators are knowledgeable on the history of each piece and each artist featured in its collection. The gallery is open 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. everyday.
Thanks to the fine staff at Sullivan Goss, there’s at least one pre-pandemic pleasure that’s still available in unadulterated form, and that’s the sublime experience of losing yourself in contemplation of a great painting. The exhibition Wosene Worke Kosrof: For Love of Words, which is on view at the gallery through September 21, is packed with some of the most generous and striking examples of contemporary abstraction you’re likely to find anywhere right now, and all that’s required is that you mask up before visiting the gallery, which is open daily 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Clad in a Mexican peasant outfit, the young woman confidently sits astride a horse rearing on its two back legs while a black and white cow observes nearby.
Barely visible in the background are the words “Hi,” “Aloha,” “Ola,” “Howdy” and “Haku.”
The title of the enigmatic oil painting is “Greetings from California, 2020,” and it is part of artist Holli Harmon’s first solo exhibition, “Califia,” on view through Sept. 21 at Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery on East Anapamu Street.
Strong female figures are integral to the works of portrait and landscape artist Holli Harmon, whose latest muse is a mythical warrior queen, Califia, aka “the Spirit of California.”
“Somehow, Califia was in my subconscious,” the local painter told the Sun, while discussing her art featured in a new exhibition, the Califia Series, at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara (through Monday, Sept. 21).
With such clarity and positivity in short supply, this new volume devoted to the paintings of Hank Pitcher comes as a much-appreciated balm to the spirit. Paging through its 254 richly colorful pages allows one to fathom the range and intensity of Pitcher’s output over a career that stretches without a break from his enrollment at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies in 1967 to the present. Although he’s probably best known for bringing images from surfing into the canon of fine art, this retrospective demonstrates how various his work has been over five decades, and how deeply rooted it is in the unique advantages offered by our region.
The Wildling Museum of Art and Nature is pleased to welcome artist Holli Harmon for the next installment of the museum’s digital presentation series on Wednesday, August 19, 2020at 4 p.m. via Zoom. Harmon previously exhibited at the Wildling Museum as part of The River’s Journey in 2018. On July 31st, she opens a new exhibition at Santa Barbara’s Sullivan Goss Gallery featuring her most recent body of work, Califia, referencing the mythical female warrior who became the state of California’s namesake.
Well-known Santa Barbara artist Hank Pitcher likes things simple, whether painting iconic scenes of contemporary California culture and the coastal landscape or describing their back stories.
This message comes across loud and clear in the huge, coffee-table book, titled simply, “Hank Pitcher,” recently published by Sullivan Goss — An American Gallery.
For nearly five decades, Hank Pitcher has painted what he knows best: Santa Barbara and the people who inhabit it. Now his gallery of 20 years, Sullivan Goss–An American Gallery, has produced an impressive monograph (Hank Pitcher, available at Upstairs and Pierre Lafond) packed with vibrant images accompanied by thoughtful essays penned by scholars, colleagues, and friends. It's a well-deserved paean to the artist's oeuvre.
As one of the original students at the College of Creative Studies (CCS), Hank Pitcher (Art '71) was influenced immediately by seminars with visionary scientist Buchminister Fuller and the beginning of a long association with literary critic Marvin Mudrick, the first CCS Provost. Working with distinguished faculty and visitors at CCS is the foundation upon which he has built his own work and on which he credits his success.
Any time is the right time to check in on the evolving artistic life of Patricia Chidlaw, one of the finer and more singular painters of note who call Santa Barbara home. But, ironically or not, her work — with its attitudinal and stylistic links to the lonely luster of Edward Hopper’s painting — suddenly feels more timely and emotionally resonant than ever in our current era.
Down through time, easel painting has been invented, reinvented, constructed, deconstructed, put to death and brought back to life again.
Solidly grounded in the historical elements of pictorial representation, Patricia Chidlaw’s approach to painting is vibrantly alive in a new exhibition at Santa Barbara’s Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery. Here, steadfast windows are open to a world of unique and overlooked wonders from California and the desert Southwest.
One of my first outings when the coronavirus lockdown started to ease was to pick up my long-awaited, signed copy of artist Hank Pitcher’s namesake retrospective at Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery in downtown Santa Barbara.
“I always hear people say that in the design for any chair or garment, the inside is just as good as the outside. The idea is to make the experience as immersive, engaging and fresh as possible,” says Divya Thakur of her intentions with her latest curatorial feat—expanding the Museum of Design Excellence (MoDE) to a digital and consequently, global landscape—made possible due to a partnership between the Museum and Google. “Brick-and-mortar museums usually think to convert physical aspects into digital. We are creating exhibits only for the digital platform…something that is tailor-made for the virtual world.”
It was remarkable then — and even more amazing now looking back — that so many important artists came to the desert in the early days.
These artists, whose paintings now garner unimaginably handsome sums at auction, worked “en plein air,” away from their studios, capturing the subtle and ever-changing colors of this unique landscape.
The early 20th century was a time of innocence and exploration in California’s desert wilds. Some painters were driven to escape the ravages of tuberculosis, and others, like Lockwood de Forest, who made 10 documented visits in the very beginning of the 20th century, were drawn by the extraordinary views made glorious by an indescribable yellow light.
Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem,” says A.A. Milne from the popular book Winnie the Pooh. This quote has directly affected the new work of artist Susan McDonnell, who will be showcasing her magical, highly realistic animal and wildlife paintings at Sullivan Goss. While her past collections have explored the intri- cacies of still life, she slowly expanded to include living elements.
No business these days is immune from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, be it ones that fall under industries designated “essential” and those that don’t.
Many in the latter category have resorted to completely digital means to keep going with varying degrees of success, but this isn’t really a viable alternative for Santa Barbara’s many art galleries.
Recently, I asked folks to send stories about animals who had changed their lives. Artist Susan McDonnell sent me her story, told through a painting.
As an explanation for the painting, here is what she wrote:
“In the early 2000s, I lived in a house with a small garden pond. In the late Spring, a Red Darner dragonfly took up residency. I started taking photos at a distance and got closer and closer. Over time the dragonfly let me get within inches and then let me lightly touch its wings. This dragonfly showed up every morning around 10 and patrolled the pond until around 4 pm for about 4 months. We ‘visited’ every day and I spent a lot of time quietly observing and marveling at the dragonfly’s beauty. As you can see from the photo this dragonfly was a bit of a ham.”
Venturing into an exhibition of paintings by Phoebe Brunner, one expects a certain transformative effect, to encounter something of an alternate reality. Land, sky, and reworked art historical references have long been at the heart of her painterly interests, but always under the influence of varying degrees of dream logic.