OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, MAY 7th | FROM 5-8pm
Sullivan Goss is pleased to present a major solo exhibition by the reigning matriarch of Santa Barbara’s plein air painting scene, MEREDITH BROOKS ABBOTT. Capturing Our Time will include paintings from the 1990s to the present day. In celebration of the artist’s enduring legacy, this exhibition will be accompanied by a new hardbound monograph, Enduring Impressions, surveying six decades of painting by the artist. A small number of advanced copies will be available for sale at the opening.
Don’t miss out. Meredith Brooks Abbott will be present at the 1st Thursday reception on May 7th.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
MEREDITH BROOKS ABBOTT (b. 1938) was one of five born in Carpinteria, California, four of whom became artists. As a teenager, she studied with painters like Richard Meryman, Douglass Parshall, and Clarence Hinkle, making her a living link to the first generation of California impressionist painters. She and her husband Duncan also own a farm in Carpinteria, where she grows some of what she paints. In 1986, she was one of the founding members of the OAK Group - a group that has painted the landscape for preservation. She has shown with many of the city’s most respected and long-lived art galleries and has sold over 1,500 paintings to a collector base numbering in the hundreds. Her work celebrates the produce, the flowers, the architecture, and especially, the landscape of Santa Barbara county. Both her daughter Whitney Brooks Abbott and her late sister Whitney Brooks Hansen were also OAK Group members, making their family one of the true dynastic art families of Southern California.
As I drive to Meredith Brooks Abbott’s 55-acre ranch in Rincon Canyon, I find myself thinking about the legendary painter Monet and the garden that he built in Giverny, south of Paris. The serenity of Giverny allowed Monet to shift away from the unruliness of painting outdoors and provided the master painter with a calm, comforting, and highly organized environment. Similarly, Brooks Abbott built herself a garden adjacent to the Victorian farmhouse dating from the 1870s that she shares with her husband, Duncan. She dug a pond in it and placed her studio near the main house. From the threshold of her artistic quarters, you can study the interplay of water, sky, and light — allowing you to focus on the imminence of the experience.
