Showing 99 results for
With no more than a cursory glance, you could be forgiven for overlooking the intricate visual perspective of Jeff Jones’s color photographs, now on view at the Milpas Street Corridan Gallery. What sets these images apart from other landscape photographs is the thoroughness of their vision.
There has always been a rift between “serious” painters, on the one hand, and illustrators who design children’s books, on the other. After all, children’s books are banal reading material for kids who need to be distracted by inferior-quality oversize pictures in primary colors-or so the theory goes.
The art lesson that Itoko Maeno is presenting to a group of fifth- and sixth-graders has something in it for everyone, and it’s also highly challenging. It simultaneously teaches artistic concepts (such as warm versus cool colors) and requires the mastering of multiple skills (including painting, printmaking, stenciling, collage, and even brainstorming.)
The annual small-image exhibit at the Atkinson Gallery is one of the oldest competitions on the West Coast, dating back 22 years. Gallery director Dane Goodman has himself juried the show in the past, and this year’s juror is Alison Saar, whose works are in the permanent collections of some of the most prestigious museums in the country, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When Patricia Clarke volunteered, in 1979, to teach English to Hmong immigrants living in Isla Vista, she never envisioned that, 28 years later, she would photograph an impoverished Hmong village in the remote hinterlands of Laos.
I cannot imagine a more pleasant treasure hunt than wandering through Santa Barbara and Goleta in search of art in unconventional spaces. My ongoing investigation of the region’s shops, restaurants, and coffee houses has convinced me that good art can do more than heighten the sensory experience of these locales; it can provide the frisson of finding a thing of beauty in an unexpected spot.
Yes, Molly Hahn is only 25-and-a-half years old, but her current exhibition at Muddy Waters Cafe in no way constitutes one of those shows where a young artist attempts to pass off a limited body of work as an all-encompassing retrospective. It’s just what she’s done that she thought people might like, she’ll tell you. What Hahn is too humble to admit is that she has been producing some of Santa Barbara’s liveliest cartoon-inspired art for the past seven years.
WHAT’S IN A WORD: Words do speak, and sometimes volumetrically. Take the word “Bauhaus.” No, not that stiff and pretentious English rock band, but the original German school for Modernist ideals and the integration of the arts and architecture, the manifesto for and output of which helped to push 20th-century aesthetics into high gear.
An interest in what lies beneath the surface is at the heart of artist Stella Lai’s work. Lai was born in Hong Kong but now lives in California, and each of the five gouache paintings in her current exhibition contains obvious and oblique references to two recurring themes: the female body and Chinese symbolism.
This story begins in so many places: Cape Cod and Santa Barbara, but also the imagination, and the art world, and wherever there are true gatherings of real friends. Heather Mattoon needs a benefit now because she is confined to a wheelchair, and is trying to put together a new life without any health insurance. She fell from a window at the end of the summer and severed her spine.
