Tag archives: art

“Clarence Mattei painted a portrait of our nation from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Shoreline… His portraits formed an album of an era which was melding the personalities of the fearless, rugged stagecoach drivers of the Wild West to the quiet confidence and well-bred sophistication of East Coast Philanthropy,” Erin Graffy, local historian, wrote […]

A pertinent historical and classical portrait exhibition is on view at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum titled, “Clarence Mattei (1883-1945), Portrait of a Community,” curated by the museum staff in conjunction with Santa Barbara historian Erin Graffy. Mattei’s portraits feature local to international luminaries, politicians, film stars, and the elite. His father Felix founded Mattei’s […]

The Thomas Reynolds Gallery is generously hosting a wall for the art of two local oil painters on a mission to raise awareness of endangered animals and factory farmed animals. The exhibit is titled “EYE AM ART” and is on view now through December 31. The oil painters are longtime painter, illustrator, and teacher Nancy […]

Oriental art expert Keith Moore celebrated the tenth anniversary of his half-century with a boffo bash in The Pickle Room, formerly Jimmy’s Oriental Garden belonging to the Chung family, where Keith’s father used to play saxophone. Keith, a sixth-generation Santa Barbarian, as well as a life member of the Society of California Pioneers, even brought […]

The Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art shares the deep trove of art collected by the late Barry Berkus, an architect, urban planner, watercolor artist, and author, in A Bold and Unconventional Collector: Highlights from the Barry Berkus Family Collection, which will be on display from November 17 to December 12. The public is invited to […]

Jeanette Fantone, a Japanese Filipino animator from Carpinteria, has won a 2022 Princess Grace Award. Her work largely stems from cultural nostalgia and gravitas towards the manipulation of textures and tactility as a way of invoking impressions of memory. Fantone received her BFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts this year and competed three films in […]

Globetrotting accountant Frank McGinity opened the gates of his charming Riven Rock estate, just a tiara’s toss from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for An Artful Affair for 120 guests organized by the Art Foundation of Santa Barbara. Five local plein air artists – Ralph Waterhouse, Derek Harrison, Annie Hoffman, Ray Hunter, and Ann […]

“Art for Good” is indeed the modus operandi for Helena Mason Art Gallery owner Natalie Olivas Sanchez, with her husband, realtor Jamie Sanchez. Moving from strictly doing art exhibitions and selling art, she decided to turn the hip interior with an outdoor patio into an event space, one that brings the community together and benefits […]

Patricia Houghton Clarke’s newest exhibit Primal Wild is on view at Silo 118 Gallery, now through October 29. There are 18 framed and matted photographs in the show, five color and seven black and white, square sized at 24×24” and rectangles at 33×49”. The selection was curated and installed by Bonnie Rubenstein. In a curio […]

I attended the opening of Ishi Glinsky’s solo exhibit titled Upon a Jagged Maze at the Art, Design & Architecture (ADA) Museum at UC Santa Barbara, sponsored by the ADA Museum’s Council. The exhibit is on view through January 22, 2023.  The 25 works from 2009 to 2022 were selected by museum Director Gabriel Ritter, […]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it was a photo that inspired a thousand (or so) paintings when the Oak Group gathered under an expansive eponymous tree along the San Marcos Foothill Preserve 35 years ago for a photo. Founded on the idea of painting the places of nature in an effort […]

Social gridlock reigned at artist Colette Cosentino’s Atelier and Gallery on West Anapamu when she opened her latest exhibition in collaboration with former Sunstone Winey vintner Anna Rice, who is using Colette’s artwork for her labels on her wine, including the Brut Rosé and Chardonnay. “It’s the perfect melding,” says Anna, now owner of the […]

Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Parallel Stories investigates the concept that while something gets lost in translation, maybe also there’s something to be gained in the process, at least in relation to poetry, serving to build bridges across borders and between cultures via introducing new syntactic strategies, rhythms, and image repertoires. Poet, translator, and literary […]

Montecito artist Joan Rosenberg-Dent was an early participant on the Santa Barbara Studio Artist Tour, but quit after a couple of years due to being the solitary sculpturist on the self-guided driving tour of local studios.  It wasn’t that standing out from her peers was a problem, as the porcelain artist has blazed a few […]

With students about to swarm back to the seaside campus, UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum is opening its fall-winter exhibition, “Ishi Glinsky: Upon a Jagged Maze.” The show is the first solo museum exhibition of L.A.-based Glinsky, an early career survey of 25 works made over the past decade including painting, works on paper, […]

Painter Richard Schloss, who has worked and exhibited in Santa Barbara since 1972, brings his half-century of experience to his brand-new book, Painting the Light. A member of Santa Barbara’s The Oak Group since its inception in 1986, Schloss nowadays has largely eschewed painting en plein air in favor of working in his studio on […]

Art historian Alexander Alberro, PhD presented his research on Kinetic, Op and Participatory Art at Mid-Century at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on August 31. He has written about this topic in his 2017 book titled, Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art. He is a Virginia Bloedel Wright Professor […]

Sunday, August 21 marked the reception for the second public art exhibit for Tamara Thompson, with over 40 natural seaweed designs on watercolor paper, framed and matted, for wall and tabletop.  Thompson, self-named “The Seaweed Artist,” is in a group show with her father, Michael Harvan, a local landscape painter, at the Apiary in Carpinteria […]

I am no artist. In school, art class was offered until eighth grade, a curriculum that didn’t exactly develop my inner Frida Kahlo. I have always been interested in painting, but never really knew where to start. That is, however, until one morning, when I saw a sign advertising art classes in the window of […]

Placing her bright white 36”x36” square canvases on the floor, she meditates and pours a line of indigo paint in a circle. Yes, a circle in a square. She watches as the paint free forms to create what she terms a ‘Spiritual Plateau,’ a place of quiet and peace for her, thus titled, Meditation Circle […]