A new book has just been published on the art and life of artist Wosene Worke Kosrof called WOSENE: Beyond Words.
Making my way in to see Nicole Strasburg’s new Sullivan Goss exhibition Surfacing, diverse enticements were there to behold in this spatially generous, three-gallery-deep art space. This summer’s triple play of shows includes Holli Harmon’s intriguingly multifaceted To Feast on Clouds and the seasonal group show spritzer dubbed Summer Fling in the large middle space, including colorful, eye-buzzing works by Penelope Gottlieb, Robert Townsend, and one of Hank Pitcher’s fetching surfboard “portraits.”
By association, Strasburg’s conceptually elastic variations on seascape paintings should also qualify as summery fare. And yet these seaside scenarios, taken individually and as a variegated and integrated ensemble, can take on introspective and artistically adventurous sub-turns, far from the realm of idle beachgoer’s escapism.
I love to write about artists’ homes. They are never ordinary. This home is no exception. It was built by landscape artist Lockwood de Forest, with help from his son-in-law, architect Winsor Soule. There are numerous examples of de Forest’s paintings in Santa Barbara at the Sullivan Goss Gallery, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, and will also be in the future Chrisman California Islands Center in Carpinteria.
TWELVE GOUACHE PAINTINGS ON FABRIANO WATERCOLOR PAPER may be Holli Harmon’s crown jewel. Each one features a month of the year reproduced from an 1866 Farmer’s Almanac, when hand labor began to be replaced with machine farming. Each piece, inspired by her sketchbook, represents a month of the year at the Jalama Canyon Ranch, floating over deep blue cyanotype prints made using autochthonous vegetation.
Two shows open July 28 at Sullivan Goss: 1) Holli Harmon’s To Feast on Clouds: “An impressive group of 89 paintings of clouds rendered onto vintage tableware will take over the walls of one of the gallery’s spaces. The accumulation of clouds from sunny to stormy and everything in between creates a conversation about water, where it comes from and how it works in relation to the food we grow that eventually ends up on our tables.”
Nicole Strasburg’s Surfacing: “Long associated with 12 x 12 inch paintings on birch panels that seem to float away from the white walls of the gallery, the artist has, in the last two years, adopted a slightly larger square format of 14 x 14 inch panels with beautifully-finished wood sides. Impressive suites of paintings in both formats can be seen and purchased in this special exhibition. They will be joined by a focused presentation of larger paintings that revel in the endless forms and colors offered by those places where ocean, sky, and land meet.”
Santa Barbara, with fewer than 90,000 people, barely makes it into California’s 100 largest cities. But this coastal enclave has an outsize role in the state’s history.
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...[H]ead a couple blocks north on Anacapa Street to Sullivan Goss, a private three-room gallery around the corner from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where pieces can cost as much as a home down payment and the collection leans heavily on evocative portrayals of the American West. Catch the current exhibition by the Santa Barbara-based artist Robin Gowen, called “Last Shadow & First Light” (through July 24), of large-format paintings of Central California’s distinctive landscapes.
IF THE JOB OF THE ARTIST IS TO REVEAL NEW EXPERIENCES, the exhibition Where the Wild Things Grow has succeeded. Even if you've been to the magnificent Ganna Walska Lotusland gardens, you'll see the place anew thanks to 28 different artists who have transferred their Lotusland experience onto paper, sculpture, and paintings. If you listen carefully, you can hear the plants talk.
The community will have a chance to meet local artists while also supporting Lotusland at the same time in Santa Barbara on Thursday from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Sullivan Goss Art Gallery in Santa Barbara is excited to collaborate with Lotusland in Montecito.
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.”
She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1907 to a military family of high standing. He was born in L.A. in 1968 to a Hollywood family of note.
East Coast, West Coast. Modern, contemporary. Grandmother, grandson.
Betty Lane, an artist first and foremost, but a diarist, too. Christopher Noxon, a writer first, but then an illustrator and now a painter.
Opening March 31 at Sullivan Goss: paintings by two artists, Betty Lane and Christopher Noxon (whose studio was a highlight of last fall’s Ojai Studio Artists tour). Below: Noxon’s “Meditation Mount.”
Through April 24th, Sullivan Goss will show Surreal Women as a companion exhibition to its REAL WOMEN: Realist Art by American Women exhibition of 2021. The exhibition embraces intuition, bypassing the intellectual constructs of Breton’s infamous manifesto to go straight for the heart.
HONORING WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH and paying tribute to women who joined the Surrealist Movement that began in France entered the America in the 1920s, Sullivan Goss curators Susan Bush and Jeremy Tessmer chose fifteen contemporary women artists for Surreal Women, on view through April 24th.
Montecito dynamic duo Bill and Sandi Nicholson co-hosted a boffo bash at the Sullivan Goss Gallery for a new feature documentary, Helen Believe, which debuted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
It’s always fascinating to see how creative people evolve and continue to create in different ways throughout their lives. Lynda Weinman was an early pioneer in computer and web graphics who went on to cofound (with her husband, Bruce Heavin) Lynda.com, one of the first online educational enterprises to teach digital tools and skills. They sold the company to LinkedIn in 2015, and Weinman began to pursue an interest in ceramics. She discovered 3D clay printing in 2020, and today she is one of its foremost pioneers, working fluently with geometric and parametric forms. Her 3D-printed ceramic and plastic sculptures are currently on view at Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery.
“Crop the bottom!” said the comment on Instagram about Patricia Chidlaw’s painting for the 38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival poster. It was a reaction that we expected. But it is the bottom half of the piece (which showcases a parking lot with cars stationed against a wall) that elevates the work to the sublime.
“To be sure, Patricia’s work beautifully captures environments while not editing out the visual noise of power lines, graffiti, and disrepair,” says David B. Walker, CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art, where Chidlaw had a major exhibit in 2014. “These elements play antagonist roles in her eloquent compositions.”
AS TECHNOLOGY GROWS AND IMPACTS THE WORLD AROUND US, people turn to the natural world for reprieve and inspiration. Regenerate, the latest exhibition at Sullivan Goss, is bursting with figures that reference but also morph natural figures, shaping them into something are as familiar as they are unrecognizable. Featuring the artworks of J. Bradley Greer and local artist and SBIFF Board of Directors President Lynda Weinman, Regenerate asks viewers to consider their position in between nature and technology and if these things are as far apart from each other as one might initially believe.
Just in front of the 2023 Academy Awards, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) is bringing some of the industry's top stars for a multi-day event of films and tributes. SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling says in its 38th year, the festival will have 52 world premieres, 79 U.S. premiers and 43 countries will be represented. The festival runs from February 8 to 18. The date has moved in recent years to stay close to the Oscar nominations and awards ceremony. Durling enthusiastically talked about the event as he unveiled the poster from acclaimed local artist Patricia Chidlaw inside the Sullivan and Goss art gallery in downtown Santa Barbara.
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) has unveiled its poster and programming for this year's festival set to kick off on February 8.
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A press conference was held at the Sullivan Goss art gallery on Wednesday morning where Santa Barbara artist Patricia Chidlaw was announced as the creator of this year's poster.
From "Dude" to "Dude" - cultural stereotypes live on in new images. The land of the West is just as captivating as the figures who used to roam it. Where there once cowboys blazing the trail of Manifest Destiny, we now have surfers who keep their gaze fixed on the horizon, waiting for their opportunity to work with the ocean around them.
Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery is presenting “The Search for the Modern West” as its first exhibit for 2023.
The exhibit features paintings, sculptures and prints that address the mythology, history and real life experiences of the American West.
“Imaginary Falls in Charcoal, Ink and Oil,” a solo exhibition by Joseph Goldyne, is on view through Dec. 26 at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
“Mr. Goldyne is a well-regarded and widely-collected print maker, but these imaginary waterfalls are all unique works executed with neither press nor plate,” said Jeremy Tessmer, gallery curator and director. “Instead, the plurality of works in the exhibition represent the artist’s first efforts in charcoal presented in context with three paintings in oil and india ink.”
On Thursday, November 3rd, Natalie Arnoldi and Joseph Goldyne will share a space at Sullivan Goss gallery in Santa Barbara, California. Their complimentary solo exhibitions of paintings and drawings of the natural world promise a contemporary view of the sublime.
NUANCED, tantalizing, messy… reflecting the accretion and assimilation of a lifetime of rich experience, the 16 canvases that make up Beyond Words at Sullivan Goss speak volumes about the fullness of the years Wosene Worke Kosrof has lived. From his birth in 1950 and early years in Ethiopia, to his immigration to the United States in 1978, to his relocation to California in 1991, Kosrof has traveled, savoring experiences, and exploring new worlds as they opened to him.
In her newest body of work, Angela Perko continues to weave mytho-historical themes and iconography together with brilliant color and intricate design.
The artist’s recurring interest in how women are represented is rendered especially vivid in 10-by-10 inch oil paintings showcasing a female fertility figure from a different historical culture. A few of these are from the ancient Mexican village of Tlatilco (1200 to 200 BC), which means “The Place of Hidden Things.” And that’s the title of Ms. Perko’s ninth exhibition on view through Sept. 26 at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery.
Art’s responsibility has always been to interpret experiences during trying times; it’s a worthy vessel for our collective remembrances, as well as our trauma. Could there be a more prescient and urgent display of artistic expression in Santa Barbara than Angela Perko’s current show at Sullivan Goss Gallery, The Place of Hidden Things? I doubt it.
Angela Perko is fascinated by precious objects, and her recent series of paintings focuses on ancient female fertility figures. Perko’s paintings are always packed with quiet symbolism and deep layers of meaning; and while her new works acknowledge that women have been constantly reproduced as objects over time—from Paleolithic venus figurines to plastic Barbie dolls—the females showcased here were revered as powerful fertility symbols.
“Potluck” is the unusual name Leslie Lewis Sigler has chosen for her second solo exhibition that opened Friday at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, in downtown Santa Barbara.
Unusual because it features the contemporary artist’s signature portraits of heirloom silverware instead of casserole dishes overflowing with comfort food.
“Potluck is a celebration of life. The work is rooted in family and connecting to one another,” Ms. Sigler told the News-Press. “This body of work grew out of my longing to gather with friends and family during the dark, isolated days of the pandemic. Historically, my portraits have been singular objects, pictured and posed like an old master’s portrait. When I experimented with pairing the objects together and joining them in groups, the compositions began to symbolize joyful gatherings around crowded tables.
Potluck, paintings by Leslie Lewis Sigler, opens July 1 at Sullivan Goss: “This exhibition will feature the artist’s signature portraits of heirloom silverware—giving personality and identity to otherwise inanimate objects with refined detail. The majority of this body of work deviates from the iconic solo portraits that were so prominently featured in previous exhibitions, and encompasses instead group portraits that speak to gatherings of friends and families.”
As a realist painter, Patricia Chidlaw has long been attracted to reflection in water.
The well-known Santa Barbara artist is known for, among other things, her paintings of urban and urban-adjacent landscapes at twilight and dawn, often incorporating the changes of light reflected in either a puddle, a river or a swimming pool.
Over the course of her decades-long career, she has made paintings of neon lights, street lights and both sun and moonlight reflected in water.
For her current exhibition, “The Pool Show,” at the Sullivan Goss Gallery through July 25, Ms. Chidlaw decided to explicitly showcase the ever-changing reflections that occur in swimming pools at all times of the day.
If ever a landscape were a living, breathing thing, it's under Phoebe Brunner's brush. Plants and flowers; clouds, fog and mist; open plains, mountains and shorelines – all transformed by thick layers of light-filtered paint that seem to pulse with an inner radiance.
How does anyone make serious art in Santa Barbara?
The sun, the ocean, the beautiful people, the fresh produce … it’s a good-time kinda place, according to Nathan Vonk, owner of Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery.
“In a locally notorious essay from 2000, famed critic and teacher Dave Hickey called Santa Barbara, ‘a hellish paradise … where one doesn’t really need art … if one is comfy there.’ His essay is both hilarious and galling and not entirely incorrect. But there are now and always have been very serious artists in this small, seaside hamlet,” said Mr. Vonk.
“Leon Dabo: En France Encore,” a show timed to coincide with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s major Van Gogh-themed exhibition, is on view through March 28 at Sullivan Goss Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St.
“Leon Dabo was a French-born American artist who became well known before the first World War as a tonalist painter,” said Nathan Vonk, owner of the Sullivan Goss Gallery. “As one of the organizers of the 1913 Armory show in New York City, Mr. Dabo played a key role in introducing impressionism, post-impressionism and modernism to an American audience.
“After his time spent in Europe as an intelligence officer during the first World War, his work took a dramatic turn toward post-impressionism with pieces that show the obvious influence of Van Gogh’s work, an aesthetic lineage that only became stronger after the second World War.”
LEON DABO (1864-1960) was a French-born American painter who had an extraordinarily long career, from the early 1890s through 1954. His father, Igance Schott de Dabo was a mural painter and stained-glass artist who emigrated with his family to escape political unrest in France, settling in Detroit. Leon Dabo became a muralist, too, working on ecclesiastical and other public commissions under the direction of John La Farge in New York. In the first years of the 20th century, Dabo gained recognition as a painter, primarily of landscapes in the Tonalist style.