Santa Barbara, with fewer than 90,000 people, barely makes it into California’s 100 largest cities. But this coastal enclave has an outsize role in the state’s history.

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...[H]ead a couple blocks north on Anacapa Street to Sullivan Goss, a private three-room gallery around the corner from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where pieces can cost as much as a home down payment and the collection leans heavily on evocative portrayals of the American West. Catch the current exhibition by the Santa Barbara-based artist Robin Gowen, called “Last Shadow & First Light” (through July 24), of large-format paintings of Central California’s distinctive landscapes.

“You need to feel you’re in danger in order to do good work,” states Robin Gowen, early in our conversation. “Painters deal in jeopardy. We must make things that are not safe, that will be a surprise and a discovery — to the artist as much as the observer. Without that desire to take risks, painting can become pretty and predictable.” 

It is the presence of urgency and conflict in all of Gowen’s work that has made me an ardent admirer. She is a Santa Barbara artist who deserves overdue prominence. Gowen is Sullivan Goss’s longest-represented artist and is currently exhibiting her 12th solo show at the gallery. Titled Last Shadow & First Light, this expansive exhibition — more than 30 paintings on display until July 24 — coincides with the announcement of a new monograph surveying the career of the artist.

Opening May 26 at Sullivan Goss: a solo exhibit by Robin Gowen. “Last Shadow & First Light is an expansive overview of Robin’s enduring relationship to the landscape of the central coast. While she is adept at painting still life, figures, and architecture, the paintings in this exhibition celebrate her deep knowledge of the unpeopled places she visits regularly. Meditations on vast expanses of rolling hills along with native oak and sycamore trees are the main compositional elements.” Below: “Bitterwater Creek Cattle.”

To the gradually expanding list of cultural traditions defining Christmastime in Santa Barbara, we must fully acknowledge “100 Grand,” if it hasn’t already had its place secured on the official list.

Now in its seventh year and looking healthy and splendid, “100 Grand” is the pithily, cryptically and a accurately named exhibition at Sullivan Goss that offers art-hungry (and neophyte art-buying) Santa Barbarans a crack at 100 artworks priced under $1,000.