FOR THE TIME BEING, THIS EXHIBITION WILL BE AVAILABLE TO SEE ONLINE. APPOINTMENTS TO SEE THINGS IN PERSON CAN BE MADE IN ONE HOUR APPOINTMENTS DAILY. (See our COVID-19 VISIT / DELIVERY / PICKUP PROTOCOL)
Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery is excited to announce Elsewhere, Paradise, the Gallery's third solo exhibition for celebrated Contemporary Realist, Patricia Chidlaw. Given the artist’s surging popularity, the gallery has had to hold back all new works by the artist for months just to ensure that we could compile enough pieces to mount an exhibition. So it is our great pleasure to finally share these new paintings with fans and collectors.
Throughout her career, Chidlaw has focused on skillfully crafted, poetic scenes of the American West. Movement through time and/or space are recurring motifs depicted through trains, bus stations, vintage cars, and beloved local landmarks. They are celebrated for their design or architecture, and for the way in which they evoke the ambitions of the era from which they came. Her paintings seek the sublime in the everyday. They provide the setting for the grand human story to unfold.
This narrative quality in her work was celebrated two years ago when Santa Barbara’s then Poet Laureate Enid Osborne organized a group of poets to create works inspired by Chidlaw’s paintings for a group poetry reading during her previous exhibition. A book of these collected works with the same title as this exhibition is now being published and will be available for sale at the gallery in the coming weeks.
As the child of a military officer, Chidlaw’s childhood was spent bouncing from one European country to the next, giving the artist easy exposure to some of the world’s great art museums. She came to Santa Barbara to earn her bachelor’s degree in fine art from UCSB. Trading in a life of continual migration, she put down roots in Santa Barbara, and has been exhibiting widely throughout southern California for decades. Sullivan Goss has represented the artist since 2016, but started working with her in 2007 for the Gallery’s THE URBAN MYTH exhibition.
Any time is the right time to check in on the evolving artistic life of Patricia Chidlaw, one of the finer and more singular painters of note who call Santa Barbara home. But, ironically or not, her work — with its attitudinal and stylistic links to the lonely luster of Edward Hopper’s painting — suddenly feels more timely and emotionally resonant than ever in our current era.
Down through time, easel painting has been invented, reinvented, constructed, deconstructed, put to death and brought back to life again.
Solidly grounded in the historical elements of pictorial representation, Patricia Chidlaw’s approach to painting is vibrantly alive in a new exhibition at Santa Barbara’s Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery. Here, steadfast windows are open to a world of unique and overlooked wonders from California and the desert Southwest.
