Since I wrote a cover story about Hank Pitcher in 2017, one of the richest experiences of my life in Santa Barbara has unfolded — perhaps more satisfying than anything I’ve ever experienced during my tenure in our beloved city. I regularly show up to Hank’s studio to admire his work, but primarily to talk about art. The conversations are never small talk — we often pick up where we left off, doing deep dives about art, literature, and film, and that’s why I cherish them.
Many martinis are consumed. We speak about the influences in our lives: the movies we love, the disappointments and successes. Every time I have walked into his studio, I have been taken aback by the maturity, the continuous searching, and the boundless curiosity of this artist, who is undeniably our greatest in Santa Barbara. He is a giant. And yet I have seen vulnerable sides to him — times where insecurity creeps in — and that makes him oh-so human and even more magnificent. He’s an artist through and through — and Santa Barbara has been his muse. His other muse has been the love of his life — his wife, Susan Pitcher. Susan and Santa Barbara to him are one and the same. Both represent his home and earn his everlasting devotion.
Yet nothing prepared me for what I saw when I showed up to Hank Pitcher’s studio on December 12, 2024. I had read that throughout history, painters have created their best work well into their seventies and eighties — e.g., Matisse, Picasso, and Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m a big fan of Claude Monet, and I have visited his studio in Giverny where, at an advanced age, he painted his masterpieces from his garden — the water lilies. These artists became more introspective and daring with age. An accumulation of life experience combined with a confidence in their craft and an empowering way of expression led to greater insight and product.
Like those other great artists, Hank Pitcher’s new exhibition at Sullivan Goss Gallery — titled The Miramar Affair — is the best showcase by an artist we will witness in Santa Barbara this year. His precision, insight, technical skill, and complex ideas — plus the cohesiveness of the work — will be hard to match. At 75 years old, Hank Pitcher is an artistic force of nature. Rejoice.
There are several prominent works in this show. “Yellow Umbrella” is the one that beckons you from the start. A lone woman is lying on the beach with a big yellow umbrella sheltering her against a dramatic blue sky. When I first saw it, I couldn’t help but think of the Joni Mitchell tune from “Big Yellow Taxi”: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
I brought up to Hank that to me, the umbrella symbolized him — in a protecting act — and Susan was the lady lying on the sand. In the composition, she’s in the lower part of the frame — vulnerably. For a moment, he became emotional. “This exhibit is about Susan,” he explains. “Yes. I realize the whole reason I’ve been painting all these years at Miramar — over 50 years — is because of her.” What we’re witnessing in this exhibit is Hank’s act of memorializing and reclaiming a past that is fading away.
One day in 1978, Pitcher was painting a couple posing on the corner of Sola and Anacapa streets when he met New Yorker Susan McKaba. It was his last day to work on the painting, which had taken a very long time, and he spotted her out of the corner of his eye. “I was struck, but she disappeared,” he recalls. Then she suddenly reappeared in front of him, asking, “Are you Hank Pitcher?” It turns out that McKaba was soon leaving town for a job in New York City. Smitten, Pitcher sold a catamaran and moved to New York to convince her to marry him. After a year, they returned to Santa Barbara, but Susan was still not ready for commitment. Thinking that he would never come through, she told Hank that if he got her a place on Miramar Beach, they’d move in together. They lived at 1538 Miramar Beach and were married in 1985. “Meeting Susan was a crossroads in life,” exclaims Hank.
Consequently, in this show, the painting titled “The Proposal” is a keystone piece. “We’ve never shown a Hank Pitcher painting without color,” said Jeremy Tessmer, Sullivan Goss Gallery director. “It shows you the excellence of his shapes, the sophistication of his compositions, and his deep interest in painterly gestures. Most people love Hank’s color. This gives them a very different idea of who he is as an artist.”
The work is done using the grisaille technique — a method used for hundreds of years. In 1937, Pablo Picasso used grisaille to paint one of his most celebrated works, “Guernica.” Pitcher uses a limited monochromatic palette, only shades of gray; the result is that we focus on the tonal values and the form. The painting achieves a depth and dimension that is astonishing — we simultaneously take in the couple in the middle of their intimate moment, the man hiding a bouquet of flowers behind his back — while also soaking in the environment surrounding them, including what’s now the Rosewood Miramar Beach in the background, as if it were a film shot with an anamorphic lens.
Susan Pitcher came into the studio while I was interviewing Hank and noticed me being fascinated by the work. “It has a real cinematic look,” she says. “It’s like a photo from the ’70s where the color has faded.” It also recalls old movies — a classic romantic comedy starring Cary Grant.
Another pivotal couple, Josiah and Emmeline Doulton, purchased a 20-acre oceanfront property in Montecito in 1876, which they named Ocean View Farm. In 1889, they built a separate cottage for visiting friends, which soon served to accommodate outside guests. A hotel was established, and a guest at the hotel suggested that the name be changed to “Miramar,” meaning “behold the sea.” Beyond the hotel area, little cottages were built as changing rooms for the Montecito estates. In time, these narrow structures were expanded to become homes.
The hotel struggled during the depression and was sold to Paul Gawzner in 1939. It then became a popular stop for William Randolph Hearst and his entourage on their way to Hearst Castle. Robert Mitchum was so smitten by the place that he moved in nearby. F. Scott Fitzgerald was known to visit with his friend and lover, the columnist Sheilah Graham. There’s a photo of Albert Einstein enjoying Miramar Beach. The hotel and the beach have long attracted celebrities, but it was never snobby. Middle-class families were known to enjoy the premises.
“When I was a kid, people went there for nature and privacy,” Hank said. “It used to be about the stars in the sky — not the stars in Montecito.”
He does recall meeting Eva Marie Saint outside his cottage one morning, the first celebrity he’d ever met. The old Miramar hotel with its iconic blue roofs shut down in 2000 and changed hands multiple times until Rick Caruso opened the Rosewood Miramar Beach in 2019.
“Every beach has its own population and relationship between the people and the place,” said Pitcher. “I think it is a combination of knowing those people and being fascinated by them. I cannot think of Miramar without thinking about the people there.”
About two years ago, he was commissioned by a resident of the beach to commemorate a birthday with a painting. Once that work started, it got something much bigger underway: A year and a half of Pitcher painting on that one-mile stretch of sand from the Coral Casino to Fernald Point in Montecito ultimately produced 44 works, from which 20 are on exhibit.
“I like to paint in the place,” Pitcher states. “The hardest thing in contemporary culture is to stay in place. If you spend a lot of time in one place and really pay attention, you develop an intimate relationship with it.”
There is a group of small paintings that are fascinating. They are “vignettes” of people interacting on the beach — “snapshots.” Each one tells a story. Whereas Hank previously would spend a few hours on small paintings, this time around, he devoted weeks to each work, layering details.
“One of the things I love about being on the beach,” he confides, “is all the stories that are happening in it.”
There’s a portrait of a young woman — “an influencer,” with her cell phone — recalling a very classical figure — a modern Venus. Another canvas depicts a man holding a beer while nearby, there’s a man with his cell phone. There’s a strong voyeuristic effect happening when taking in all the different small paintings together. It resembles Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where James Stewart observes the apartments across from him and he (and the audience) sees the pulsating rhythms of life. Clearly, these paintings are about memories, — yet they’re vivid. The past and the present are colliding in them, yet there’s no melancholia. They’re alive — and urgent. “When I’m at Miramar Beach, I’m dealing with the present, but I’m also dealing with the past,” Pitcher tells me.
It is conspicuous to notice so many figures all at once in Pitcher’s creations — having been accustomed to many exhibitions of his landscapes. He says, “I have always painted figures. I started painting landscapes a long time ago as studies for backgrounds for figures, and whenever I paint a landscape, I am imagining a figure in it. The landscapes without figures are more popular in this market and therefore get shown more here in Santa Barbara. I have many figure paintings in my storage. I think this show has more figures because Miramar is so much about the people there.”
And yes, the backgrounds are rich — atmospheric — and the interplay with the bodies is fascinating. It’s worth noting how the characters’ faces and bodies are dramatically in half-shadows, albeit in broad daylight. In most beaches, people are enveloped either in shadows or in full light. At Miramar, light is always romantically perpendicular. And in the background, there’s the ocean, the sky, and the architecture of cottages or the Rosewood Miramar Beach. The latter, when depicted, is blurry.
“I have done many paintings of Miramar that focus on the architecture, and there are a few in this show,” says Pitcher. “ ‘Tommy’s Miramar’ — that very popular image has no people in it — though it is all about the personalities of the people who built and/or live in the cottages. I loved the old blue roofs of the old Miramar hotel. I did not know how to deal with the change to the new hotel, until I noticed, when the light hits the Rosewood Miramar in such a way, that it became a simple shape of light. That it could be more of an archetype. I wanted to paint the feeling of the place, the feeling of that beach, the atmosphere that the people are in. That dreamy feeling of being there.”
Susan Pitcher chimes in, “There’s something about that beach that is of another time.”
I point out to Hank that most of the paintings include a railing. It was something he hadn’t noticed at first, but then it became integral. He explains that when you’re surfing, you look for the right spot. It’s called the lineup. The best place to take off. The rail became his lineup. I bring up the fact that it is a symbol, representing a sense of steadiness and support, which circles back to his relationship with Susan, and it also has this sense of connection — it’s how we enter or leave the beach. It is aspirational.
It’s been intriguing for Hank how much has been revealed by creating this latest work — seeing what is there and what is reflecting.
“I’ve never felt old,” he shares, “and I mostly feel very young. It’s the first time that I’ve accepted that I’m older. When I was making these paintings, I got hearing aids and got cataract surgery. There’s more reflection in these series than there is generally in my work.”
His previous exhibits were entitled The Long View and Look Out, and now, in The Miramar Affair, the master painter is looking inward.