OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, JUNE 1st | FROM 5-8pm
Sullivan Goss is excited to announce the 12th solo exhibition for ROBIN GOWEN and her 27th year exhibiting with the gallery. This exhibition will also be accompanied by the announcement of a new monograph surveying the career of the artist.
LAST SHADOW & FIRST LIGHT is an expansive overview of Robin’s enduring relationship to the landscape of the central coast. While she is adept at painting still life, figures, and architecture, the paintings in this exhibition celebrate her deep knowledge of the unpeopled places she visits regularly. Meditations on vast expanses of rolling hills along with native oak and sycamore trees are the main compositional elements. The peaks and valleys, branches and shadows have been the main focus of Robin's paintings for decades; whether viewed in early morning or twilight, Spring or Summer, she is adept at capturing their nature, always true to the time of day or season.
Robin paints fast - partially from practiced experience and partially from an urgency to get the image out into the world. For more than four decades, she has painted as if what she’s seeing might disappear with the next breeze. As a result of her swift painting, Robin is a prolific painter. This exhibition comprises more than thirty paintings that range from postcard size to small billboards. Interestingly, for a plein air painter working in Santa Barbara, there are a surprising lack of seascapes in Robin’s overall body of work. This exhibition will include two of these rare scenes - one when the sun is high and one at the end of the day.
“You need to feel you’re in danger in order to do good work,” states Robin Gowen, early in our conversation. “Painters deal in jeopardy. We must make things that are not safe, that will be a surprise and a discovery — to the artist as much as the observer. Without that desire to take risks, painting can become pretty and predictable.”
It is the presence of urgency and conflict in all of Gowen’s work that has made me an ardent admirer. She is a Santa Barbara artist who deserves overdue prominence. Gowen is Sullivan Goss’s longest-represented artist and is currently exhibiting her 12th solo show at the gallery. Titled Last Shadow & First Light, this expansive exhibition — more than 30 paintings on display until July 24 — coincides with the announcement of a new monograph surveying the career of the artist.
Opening May 26 at Sullivan Goss: a solo exhibit by Robin Gowen. “Last Shadow & First Light is an expansive overview of Robin’s enduring relationship to the landscape of the central coast. While she is adept at painting still life, figures, and architecture, the paintings in this exhibition celebrate her deep knowledge of the unpeopled places she visits regularly. Meditations on vast expanses of rolling hills along with native oak and sycamore trees are the main compositional elements.” Below: “Bitterwater Creek Cattle.”
