Inside Jobbing, Muse in Tow

What interior life meets an atmosphere of interiority at the Architectural Foundation Gallery, presently. More to the point, the exhibition What Remains marks the meeting of sensitive indoors-oriented painter Ella Jennings and woodworker Don Scott, whose work spans the domains of form and function. Together, a common resonance is the happy result in this unique gallery space — which, incidentally, is a welcoming interior itself.

The title What Remains relates to a commonality of practice in their work, however otherwise disparate. Jennings paints on salvaged wood. Scott creates his polished wood pieces from salvaged wood from dead trees and felled branches, mostly from around the region — including the very property hosting the show.

Jennings, a Westmont-trained artist who also worked in the Ridley-Tree Museum of Art there for a time, has created a body of small oil-on-wood paintings, some of a postcard scale, which invite us to lean in for close scrutiny. Many of the paintings bask in the calm spirit and quietude of interiors and in often older, wood-endowed houses. The wood aspect then has an echo across the room, where Scott’s elegant wooden bowls and vessels are displayed on small shelves — although the pieces are ultimately table-suitable. 

Warm hues, textures and angles prevail in Jennings’s work, and her rooms are sans actual figures, but sometimes suggest inhabitants in absentia, as in “We Two.” Christian/spiritual essences and symbolism can be inferred, though never explicitly, as in “Means of Understanding” and “Chapel of Dreams,” built from the perspective of peering through doors to other rooms, other realms.

Specific features define some of the compositions, seen in the tripartite, trinity themed “Uplift,” based on three window forms, and the self-explanatory “Three Doors.”

Jennings also ventures outside into nature, with the deep-focus branch study “Bones,” and a rare venture into the realm of the surreal, with her Magritte-y image of an illogically placed lighthouse and enveloping sky, “Jumping Off Place.”

Literally coming down to earth, Scott’s component in the exhibition celebrates its own juggling of form and function and, in a deep conceptual way, bows to the majesty and mutability of wood as material and natural source. Those wood sources are drawn from specific places and environmental situations around the area, including the ragged-edged olive from Lotusland and the Evergreen Pear resourcefully lifted from a deceased tree just outside the back door of the Architectural Foundation. Another rough-rimmed ironbark eucalyptus bowl was fashioned from wood borrowed from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

A manzanita burl gives life to the ravaged tree life from the El Capitan “Sherpa” fire zone, while another bowl was sourced from lodgepole pine from the Eastern Sierra.

What Remains amounts to an intriguing inside-outside marshalling of creative forces and visions, in two and three-dimensions, with nature — and the actual and metaphorical nature of space — at its dual center of attentions.

What Remains by Don Scott and Ella Jennings is on view at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara (229 E. Victoria St.) through November 7. There will be an Artist Talk on Saturday, October 10, at 2 p.m. See afsb.org.