For many years, as one of Santa Barbara’s more intriguing left-of-landscape-tradition painters, Nicole Strasburg has been building an artistic voice and substantive body of work. Often working in the medium of oil-on-birchwood, versus the expected canvas, her work and her eye stand apart from landscape and seascape art norms and stake a claim in a stylistic avenue all her own. With The Whole Is Greater, her latest show at her longstanding gallery home Sullivan Goss, Strasburg ventures into territory at once new, familiar, and reconfigured.
For those of us familiar with her past art, the exhibition represents a pleasantly disarming variation-morphing shift, into work which sometimes ventures into the world of multiples — triptychs, diptychs and even a pentaptych (five-paneled, the term for which was kindly supplied me by Sullivan Goss curator Susan Bush). Also, geometry enters the conceptual picture, previously seen mainly in her recurring motif of dramatic ocean horizon lines in a composition, along with experimental notions of artwork framing and enclosures.
The plot thickens even further: the largest piece originally in the show, “Sea Level,” (now sold and carted off) was an assemblage-like combination of some 18 panels, some stacked atop others. It is a spectrally harmonious composite of sea and sky images (a regular point of interest for her), and conceptually against type in terms of standard nature-based art.
A more compact example, which is in-house, is “Shoreline Construction,” which engages multiple perspectives on shoreline sightings, with her signature echoing of cloud forms and waves. But these are offset, and “complicated” (in a good way) by squares of abstract color swatches: the palette is contiguous with the color patterns used in the whole of the painting.
Strasburg deals with multiples in different ways, from the fluid flow of images in the triptych “Sun Glow” to the clever optical dichotomy of “Time and Tide,” again playing sea against sky and connecting the two natural expanses. Five is the magic number of panels in the tellingly titled “Assembly California.” An implied narrative logic links the culled images of forest, shimmering shore (she does savor shimmering sand) and winding river arabesques, from an aerial view.
Another atmospheric evocation hangs across the room in the gallery, with “A Smell of Salt.” A horizontally organized triptych, the piece juggles tide, foaming waves and a dreamily colored sky, stacked in slices. It conspires toward a sensual yet analytical study of coastal reality, with a virtual hint of salt-aired aroma rising up from the piece — almost too perfectly suited to summer in Santa Barbara.
Into these slices of Californian paradisiacal visions comes evidence of man’s toxic footprint in the form of small paintings of illuminated oil derricks, in “romantic” nocturnal views, in “Modern Icons.” These seem all the more pernicious given recent headlines about Trump’s rubber-stamping of Sable Oil’s drilling aggression in Gaviota. And yet Strasburg’s depictions are also plainly beautiful to behold as paintings. These are a part of our seascape, like it or loathe it.
One Strasburg-ian quality detected and intact in this body of new work is her special handling of, and eye for, tall, foreground-heavy coastal visions, in which she captures the transition space of sand yielding to sea — ever lapping, naturally in flux, in a vertical painting like “Joyful Anyway.” (Re: the title — maybe joyful despite the eco-dread of ocean drilling?)
Next to that painting, as a point of companionship and contrast, there hangs “Tides of Possibility,” with its experimental twist attached. Here, the subject is familiar — sand, sea, and sky in a visual dance — but the palette has been amped-up to an almost psychedelic pitch, with over-cooked blues and yellows. This is beach life, but not entirely as we know it and hang out in it.
With The Whole Is Greater, we get the sense that the artist, at 60, is testing waters of a new way of approaching a well-tested path. The tides of possibilities flow endlessly, more or less.
Nicole Strasburg, The Whole Is Greater, is on view at Sullivan Goss Gallery (11 E. Anapamu St.) through August 24. See sullivangoss.com.
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