Showing 99 results for
Beauty abounds in East/West Gallery’s current exhibition, Paired. The show’s title refers to the mother/son duo Imogen Cunningham and Rondal Partridge, two iconic American photographers whose work illustrates the similarities and distinctions of inter-generational talent.
Before Photoshop and other digital media programs opened up the world of synthesized enhancement, photographers relied on framing, composition, and riveting subject matter to deliver the desired image. Among the many master photographers of the pre-digital age, Oliver Gagliani possessed a particularly preternatural ability to produce complex, imaginary landscapes that to the modern eye appear as if they must be digitally enhanced.
It’s 5:30 on Friday evening, and the long hallway gallery space at Arts Alive! Creativity Center, a converted warehouse on Calle Cesar Ch¡vez, is jammed with people, all listening to artist Robert Shetterly as he introduces his traveling exhibition, Americans Who Tell the Truth. The capacity crowd ranges in age from younger than eight to nearly 80, and in social status from lowly journalists to Congressmember Lois Capps.
Artists Michelle Y. Williams and Ray Phillips have more in common than their Texas roots and a proclivity for the abstract. These occasional collaborators also share a stylistic genealogy that unites them aesthetically. Though on a surface level their similarities are more obvious than their differences, a deeper consideration of their work reveals each artist’s distinct individuality.
John Sonsini’s portraits dignify the unseen individual. From out of a field of broad, confident brush strokes and thick applications of pigment, his subjects make eye contact with the viewer like identities trying to come into focus.
In an art gallery on a street bearing his name, a portrait of Cesar Ch¡vez gazes upon a gathering of Americans who, like him, represent the ideals on which this country was founded. Scratched above his head is a pithy quote from one of his speeches, epitomizing his commitment to those ideals.
Ben Brode’s seascapes convey a waterman’s sensibility. With their careful attention to the interactions of light and water, they read like the observations of a fisherman looking out to sea to predict the next day’s weather. Brode captures in paint that fleeting moment at sunset when the sky and sea cannot be ignored as they take over the horizon with a dynamic performance in color.
As the head of the Art Department at Santa Barbara City College and a highly respected Santa Barbara artist, Ed Inks is a fine example of the art world’s growing enthusiasm for sculpture. The artist’s newest collection of three-dimensional work, now on show at Westmont’s second annual outdoor sculpture exhibit, claims a place in the re-emergence of sculptural art that has characterized the West Coast art scene recently.
Fifty years ago in this town, Aldous Huxley gave a series of incisive, prophetic lectures, the third of which was entitled “More Nature in Art.” In it, the brilliant social satirist and late convert to Eastern and psychedelic mysticism argued that painting had become “an escape from the concrete : into descriptions : of our technological civilization.” What was needed, he claimed, was “something profoundly religious in landscape painting : to explore and express the layer of the unconscious which is beyond the personal unconscious.”
When Miki Garcia and Frederick Janka, cocurators of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum’s 2006-’07 Call for Entries exhibition, gathered to create its curatorial framework, they hoped to find a form flexible enough to encompass the eclectic yield of this year’s four winners: Bob Mask, Ethan Turpin, Christine Gray, and Team Hyperbole. As they took stock of the jurors’ selections, culled from more than 1,000 images, certain strains emerged.
