Anchored in Light: John Comer Paints Visions from ‘Across the Channel’

Each piece in John Comer’s Across the Channel has a glow… one could call it John’s style and approach to light in plein air, though really it feels more like the embers of his enthusiasm for the islands. The new series, showing at Santa Barbara Fine Art, gathers more than a dozen works painted from the islands and waters of the Santa Barbara Channel – scenes that feel at once intimate and eternal, like a memory shared between painter and place.

As we walk the show, he reflects in vivid memory each painting – its location, time of day, which ones he sketched first and painted in the studio later, and which paintings he began on his sailboat. Comer has been sailing these waters since the early 1970s, returning again and again to their shifting colors and elusive calm. “I just wanted to do a series from the islands – about the islands – to bring back the experience of being out there,” he says. “Most of these are from the ocean looking in.”

After years painting with the OAK Group and working from the land, Across the Channel represents a reversal of view and one that could only come from a lifetime on the water. Comer and his wife spent much of the past two summers aboard their handcrafted Cape George 36’ sailboat, anchoring at coves and harbors across the Channel Islands. From those vantage points, he sketched the angles of cliffs and light, the way shadow slides across the surface in the hour before dusk. Later, back in his studio, those fragments became the large-scale works that fill this show – immersive vistas of Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and beyond.

Each painting is the result of timing and intuition. Comer often waits days for the right conditions – clear skies, steady light – but just as often he paints amid unpredictability: fog, currents, the slow roll of the boat. “Sometimes painting out there, the boat’s moving and you’re just trying to control your hand,” he laughs. “Other times, it’s the movement itself that keeps things alive.” That vitality is what connects all his work: the sense that the painting is breathing, that the scene hasn’t been captured so much as kept in motion.

Comer’s history is inseparable from this coastline. A lifelong surfer, sailor, and outdoorsman, he’s spent decades exploring the Pacific – from Baja to the Caribbean to the Channel Islands that still anchor his gaze. His teacher and longtime mentor, Ray Strong, once told him that the secret to landscape painting was in the atmosphere – “the weather is the important thing… it affects what you see and don’t see.” Comer took that to heart. In Across the Channel, it’s the air that binds the work: the weight of marine haze, the warmth of sandstone, the pale blue depths just before evening.

Looking at the pieces, there were a number of red stickers marking work that has sold, but there are more than a few gems left in this show. When I notice that many of the canvas sizes are wider than traditional ratios, Comer mentioned that he tried using more classic proportions but it just didn’t capture the expanse and impact of the space.

Viewed together, the pieces form something more than a study of place – they’re a record of return. Gulls wheel through soft skies; the horizon shifts as the tide moves below. These are paintings made by someone who knows the rhythm of water as well as the rhythm of paint.

He pauses, looking toward a canvas that catches the islands in a sweep of gold light. “I just wanted to bring back what it feels like – to live here, to look across that channel, and know how special it really is.”