OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, MARCH 6th  |  FROM 5-8pm

After four long years, Sullivan Goss is excited to announce a new solo exhibition for Santa Barbara icon, HANK PITCHER. Twenty paintings – ranging in size from a suite of ten small paintings made on the beach from direct observation to six large studio paintings – will tell the story of the artist’s last year and a half on the famous beaches of Montecito. But that is only half the story…

Fundamentally, HANK PITCHER: The Miramar Affair is a love story. It’s a story about how long ago, a fierce and untamed Isla Vista painter and surfer, Hank Pitcher, talked a polished and manicured blonde girl from Manhattan's Upper East Side into making a life with him. She was more Montecito than he was, so she asked him to find a way to live on Miramar Beach. To make his dream come true, he did.

They were young and filled with ambition. It was during that time that he painted Tommy’s Miramar, one of his early masterpieces. That painting was one of the best-selling images of Santa Barbara ever to be created. His career blew up.

That was forty years ago. Hank and Susan Pitcher are now grandparents. So, when a local collector commissioned him to come back and paint the Miramar, all of those old stories began to glow again.

And he saw how love continues to unfold in this place of dreams. He witnessed a stage managed proposal. He also saw a new generation calling themselves “influencers” trying to live the dream before they can really afford it. Lighting the way from around the point, the Coral Casino’s lighthouse continues to lure would-be’s and already-are’s to a storied stretch of coastline. The tower itself keeps changing, but the beacon shines on. Fitzgerald once visited that beach; so did Einstein. But it was Fitzgerald who articulated its appeal in The Great Gatsby, writing of another such light that it makes us believe in “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Over the years, Hank has occasionally been called back to Miramar Beach. The affair, it seems, continues.