OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2017, FROM 5 - 8PM
If every artist’s painting is a self-portrait, what do these new paintings tell us about Meredith Brooks Abbott ? As an active painter in the area for decades, what is new in these familiar vistas? Why are we drawn again and again to the still life paintings of flowers from her garden? In her newest exhibition at Sullivan Goss, Meredith Brooks Abbott reveals herself anew in a bright crop of recent paintings.
As a well known American Impressionist , Abbott’s art paints a portrait of the artist as a seeker of beauty and bounty in nature. Like a perennial flower, she returns to certain sites again and again, always trying to paint them as though she were cresting that same ridge for the first time. What is new here? What does the scene offer now that it hasn’t before?
Abbott’s intimate portraits of cut-flowers and cloth are interleaved with grand views of local farm land, the ocean, and even 2016’s unusual formation of pyrocumulous clouds over the mountains. This year’s fire season was aggravated by the continuing drought in Southern California. However, the California that Abbott paints looks anything but drought-stricken; flowers bloom with vibrancy, fields are plowed and fertile for the next harvest which also speaks to the deep roots of the Brooks and Abbott families on the central coast, both familial and agricultural. She uses the the atmospheric So-Cal light to shine on the bounty of agricultural and native flora of the left coast. Her paintings offer a reminder of greener times and hope for the rains that will come.
Meredith Brooks Abbott is a beloved American painter. Her Impressionist style descends through the French tradition to the California tradition, which she learned from her instructors Richard Meryman, Douglass Parshall (1899-1990) and Clarence Hinkle (1880-1960).
