Tag archives: artist
Paintings, photography, sculpture and assemblage populate most of the workspaces for the 2026 Santa Barbara Studio Artists tour that takes place every Labor Day weekend. But it’s a fairly good bet that if you join the 25th anniversary of the self-guided visit to artist studios around town, you won’t see much that resembles what paper […]
This Workshop Fills the Sails of Your Story You find yourself secluded in thought. The idea is there but how to free it from this lonely island. A raw thought can be difficult to describe. To share with others. Freeing an idea is the art of expressing creativity. You try to find the words to […]
Santa Barbara native multi-hyphenate Rod Lathim has just published a memoir, but don’t expect it to read like typical autobiographical efforts. Finding The Divine Child: A Journey of Spirit, Light & Art is a bit like Lathim’s life in the arts – where his endeavors include serving as an actor, director, producer, photographer, singer, writer […]
In her four decades as a recording artist, singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega has displayed a remarkable knack for creating songs that sound at once deeply personal and utterly universal, a true gift given that almost all of them are written from the first-person point of view. The observational pieces date to her early days with such […]
Emerging artist and Westmont alumna Chelsea Roberts (’18), who delicately illustrates wildlife and flora with a gentle, compassionate reverence, opens a solo exhibition, Habitual Curiosity, in the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum’s downstairs gallery through June 20. Roberts, a scientific illustrator from Danville, conducts extensive research studying her subjects for hours before creating each piece. This forms a […]
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 […]
When Amada Cruz took over as Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s new Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Director and CEO about 13 months ago, she had a clear idea of how she viewed the museum’s evolving role in the community. “I see a lot of value in the arts beyond the aesthetic,” she said in these […]
A coup for the Elverhøj Museum is its upcoming major exhibit of works by 98 years young artist Roland Petersen [b.1926, Denmark]. The exhibit, titled The Visual Feast, is on view from October 26 through January 5. The critically-lauded Petersen has been painting for five decades, and continues to create, producing art in his Bay […]
Beloved local restaurant/living room Via Vai lost its Upper Village lease following a three-decade run. As the longtime crew tearily bade their homestead farewell, artist Carlos Pillado moved about the twilit rooms in a cloud of memory, carefully removing his art from the walls. “The day that I took down my paintings, I cried. That […]
Ariel Leira is a multidisciplinary visual artist and writer who grew up amongst the trees of Montecito, documenting her TRAVELS through glowing, abstract photography and heartfelt poetry. She was a lifer at Crane Country Day School – where we met in fifth grade – and graduated from Santa Barbara High School. Leira’s artistic proclivities began […]
Nicole Belton’s art studio, located at 1019 West in Inglewood, feels like walking into a museum of trees frozen in time. Dream-like hills and extending branches captured in a submerged composition (Skyview Drive); a tree in a moment of transition, poised before fading into a muted, decaying terrain (Ash). For the past six years, Belton […]
The importance of art to the Olympics cannot be overstated. A case in point is TM’s poster of a coveted, historic, iconic image from the 1984 Olympics, a swimmer under the ripples of the water by David Hockney (born 1937), printed in a limited edition of 750. A poster can be valuable: in this case […]
You won’t see any water towers rising above buildings in painter Sophie Cooper’s Montecito neighborhood on East Mountain Drive near Westmont College, nor anywhere in Montecito for that matter. But you will find paintings of scores of antiquated wooden tanks – which New York City required of all buildings higher than six stories starting in […]
The facts are strange. Our Earth is a largish dirt-covered rock, adrift in an endless, freezing vacuum and handily located next to an enormous lamp which ceaselessly dumps life-enabling energy onto our hills, valleys, and fleabag motels. For about 430 million years our dirt-covered rock has been busily sprouting a kingdom of living flora whose […]
Westmont alumna Ella Jennings (’23), education and outreach coordinator at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, shares her paintings of luminous interiors in an exhibition, Abide with Me, at the Fireside Gallery at Trinity Lutheran Evangelical Church, 909 N. La Cumbre, open from 10 am – 2 pm on weekdays. “The everyday buildings we frequent […]
Come one, come all! Beatrice Tolan is getting ready to put on her first art showcase: HORSE$H*T. The exhibition opens May 2nd and continues until July 2nd. Join Beatrice at Elsie’s Tavern to see her new collection and join me below to hear about the creation process! Q. Thelast time I spoke to you, you […]
Deepest childhood is sometimes recalled as a shadowy dreamscape daubed with startling bursts of color. From that protean sub-basement “mother” ascends the stairs into the light, smiling that smile, and so forth. It’s complicated, as they say. We think of Mom and language fails, obliging us to fall back on gauzy flowers and little heart-shaped […]
Just four months after moving into Casa Dorinda, artist Victoria Furst Hines has lost no time in making her mark. Victoria, who with her late husband Carter ran a popular Montecito drapery business, has displayed 36 of her colorful works in oil, acrylic and watercolor, just a tiara’s toss from the home’s capacious dining room […]
A New Yorker, iconoclast, and pioneering expressionist painter and printmaker, Cecily Barth Firestein’s “career” as an artist paralleled – and was subordinate to – what she would surely have described as her first calling of wife and mother. Therein lies a story. Firestein’s large format wonders will be on display in the Funk Zone’s communal […]
A Montecito Journal reader has a series of works that are dear to my heart. This is a portfolio of early 19th-century foreign and European landscapes rendered in 50 plus lithographs by the Scottish artist David Roberts (Edinburgh, 1796-1864). I had a year abroad in grad school at the University of Edinburgh and met my […]
