Patricia Chidlaw
Gem Theater,
159983
OPENING RECEPTION 1ST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, FROM 5 – 8PM
Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery presents Patricia Chidlaw’s first solo exhibition in Santa Barbara in over ten years. It is her first solo exhibition at Sullivan Goss and marks a new chapter in the gallery’s representation of one of California’s most renowned Urban Realists.
Patricia Chidlaw was born in San Francisco. As the daughter of an Officer, she traveled extensively in Europe and across America as her parents moved from one military posting to the next. Early, transient life on the road influences her paintings today in both the feelings they evoke and in their iconography: roadside attractions, the fringe of urban life, the view from a train window, places both recently inhabited and long vacated. Many are quintessentially Californian. Chidlaw paints the landscape, its architecture, and the signs of human presence, but she rarely paints the people themselves.
An artist dedicated to painting the American landscape, Patricia focuses on scenes from the outskirts of town, the inbetween areas of urban inhabitation and rural isolation. Her painting style echoes Edward Hopper and other great American realist painters. Her interiors and exteriors have a lonely quality to them, but it is the shared loneliness of an American population who must frequently seek their future and fortune in strange new places. We are all outsiders somewhere, her work seems to imply.
Patricia came to Santa Barbara to earn her bachelor’s degree in fine art from UCSB. Trading in a life of wanderlust, she put down roots in Santa Barbara. She and her husband still venture out either by rail or by car, looking for inspiration for her next great painting. The open road still calls.
