WHITNEY BROOKS ABBOTT
Seasonal Shift, 2017
161246
OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2018, FROM 5 - 8PM
Sullivan Goss is excited to announce our inaugural exhibition featuring the work of locally celebrated artist Whitney Brooks Abbott . Hailing from a family legacy of local artists and ranchers, Whitney joins the roster of artists at Sullivan Goss after a successful tenure with the Ellen Easton Gallery.
Thanks to Mother Nature, this past year in Santa Barbara County has been an exciting and challenging one especially if you are a plein air painter, like Whitney Abbott. The first part of the year was normal and a seven year drought was actually eased in our rainy months. But the end of the year and on into the early part of 2018 brought California’s largest wildfire followed by disruptive and tragic debris flows. Through evacuations from the fire and preparation for the floods, Whitney added paintings to the exhibition that included smoke diffused light reflected on the ocean, ash covered hills, moisture filled clouds, and alluvial plains. When viewing this exhibition as a whole and taking into consideration what was going on out of doors, it becomes apparent that she sees the interior of her home as a place of refuge from Mother Nature’s chaotic whims.
Whitney’s paintings portray a resolution of nature’s drama by offering up the solidity of nature itself. Trees are still standing strong, fields are fallow and ready to be sown, the ocean continues to cleanse and renew itself while offering up a quiet place to contemplate beauty; the resolution of chaos. We are grateful that artists like Whitney are here to whether the storms and capture the cycles of nature that never fail to bring renewal and regrowth and in the end offer up the feeling of hope.
Whitney Brooks Abbott is a fine arts graduate of UC Santa Cruz. She also completed a fellowship at Yale School of Art in Norfolk, CT. Whitney is a second generation member of the Oak Group based in Santa Barbara since 1986. She currently lives in Carpinteria, CA and is part of the Brooks and Abbott families that have farmed the area for many generations.
