Sullivan Goss is pleased to announce the eighth solo exhibition for gallery artist, Robin Gowen. Always expanding her palette and incorporating differing and distinct styles of painting, Gowen’s seventeen year tenure with the gallery is celebrated in this most recent body of work. The first artist to have a solo show at Sullivan Goss, she continues to remain one of the gallery’s bestselling artists.
Gowen’s most repeated subject is the natural landscape. Over the years her painted landscapes have moved and shifted as the earth does, continually changing color, shape and perspective. One year a muchstudied mountain range is starkly realized in vibrant colors and sharp focus only to be rendered soft and misty when revisited the next year. She will paint a stand of eucalyptus trees off in the distance and in the next painting she’ll focus in so close that the bark becomes a wooded abstract.
Robin frequently paints out of doors. Occasionally, there are bits of sand or road dust mixed in with her paints, making the land an actual part of the finished composition. She has studied the hills and valleys around Santa Barbara until she knows them as old friends. The Sierras are no stranger to her, either. Images of a childhood partially spent in Africa show up in her paintings from time to time, scenes of a landscape ingrained in her memory or discovered in old photos.
Robin Gowen was born in Lincoln Nebraska. She graduated from Philips Exeter Academy and received her B.A. from Wellesley College. She is married to Bruce Tiffney, Dean of the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, paleobotanist, and chief critic of the biology and geology of her landscape paintings. She is also an accomplished author with two novels published within the last few years, ‘Night Must Wait’ and 'Future Past’.
