HANK PITCHER
OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 2018, FROM 5 - 8PM
SULLIVAN GOSS – An American Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition called HANK PITCHER: TIDAL FORCE. On 1st Thursday, June 2, from 5-8pm, Sullivan Goss will open their first new exhibition in three years for celebrated West Coast painter Hank Pitcher. Painting at sites that are difficult to access, Pitcher’s new exhibition reaffirms his commitment to preserving a painted record of one California’s most pristine and bio-diverse coastlines while preserving and advancing the tradition of representational landscape and figure painting.
Paintings, like coastlines, are formed in a gradual process of accretion and attrition, with warm colors and cool colors pushing and pulling at each other like warm and cool ocean currents. In no other painter’s work are the dynamics of attack and retreat over time harnessed to a more resonant or beautiful effect than in the work of Hank Pitcher. Both his process and his paintings reflect his long and harmonious relationship with the California Coast as a painter, teacher and surfer. Over thirtyfive years as a professional artist, Hank has seen a number of currents in the art world; he has seen the “death” and “rebirth” of painting again and again. With typical California cool, he has done his own thing just the same. He has gone outside and made paintings of mountains and sea, of surfers and their rides, of life in California.
Blending an East Coast figurative sensibility reminiscent of Fairfield Porter with a West Coast tradition that shares as much with late Bay Area Figurative painting as with Southern Californian proto Pop experiments, Pitcher has developed a language of form, color, stroke and iconography that sets him apart in the history of American art. Furthermore, the reductive quality of his flattened shapes and his use of unmodulated colors recall the sparse Realism of Edward Hopper. With tidal force, he continues to bend the trajectory of American landscape and figure painting.
Tidal Forces, the new show of paintings by Hank Pitcher at Sullivan Goss (7 E. Anapamu St.), offers 30 or so recent images of the Central Coast. Some, like the 2010 “Two Figures and a Wave” or “Beach Volleyball, 7-10” from the same year, seem anecdotal, while others, such as the various pictures of the Gaviota Coast from winter and spring of 2011, appear primarily concerned with the contrasts and echoes of larger earth forms. What knits these disparate approaches together? There’s Pitcher’s skill and sensibility, to be sure—composition and the feel of the brush are in exquisite balance throughout—but there’s also a larger aesthetic context, something that literary critic and historian Paul Fussell dubbed the “American Shore Ode” back in 1962, that’s worth considering, especially as it allows one to make connections between poetry and painting that are too often left vague and obscure.
People often view Santa Barbara as paradise, the California dream — palm-framed vistas, glistening surf, the golden Santa Ynez Mountains, beauty as stunning and transcendent as a rainbow.
“Almost everyone who has been to Santa Barbara understands that there’s something special about it — the quality of light, the Mediterranean climate, the biodiversity, the lifestyle,” says artist Hank Pitcher, who is also a teacher and a surfer. His iconic portraits of surfboards, today’s tribal shields, symbolize California beach culture.