Five on the Rise is a stellar new exhibition rising up at REH Fine Art at GraySpace in Santa Barbara.
The exhibition includes the work of gallerist Ruth Ellen Hoag, as well as artists Kerrie Smith, Cynthia James, Cynthia Martin, and Dorothy Churchill-Johnson.
The five are long-time members of the Art Salon in Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara Studio Artists. The supportive groups assist artists and worked to raise the profile of Santa Barbara itself as an art destination.
The show opens September 18th, and each artist’s work is unique, with styles ranging from the abstract to the figurative, from surrealism to contemporary realism. As different as they are, they complement each other with vivid palettes and dynamic composition.
Smith’s work here is bright and compelling, with mesmerizing patterns and interwoven layers. She describes her work as featuring a counterbalance of symmetry and geometry with oppositional color patterns; these are deeply involving works, in which the viewer can almost viscerally feel the layers. According to Smith, her work balances and examines patterns in the environment and creates a visual conversation about the “changing intersection between place/city or nature.” More timely than ever, her work also encompasses environmental afflictions, from fires to erosion. Regardless, the work is inviting and involving, and appears to move with a shifting light.
Smith’s “Vapours 10,” above, is one such work, with images that resemble cells or tiny-living creatures appearing to float in a dark and ethereal sea.
James is also concerned with nature, but for her they are “visions from an imaginary botanical record.” She paints with oil on copper, creating a sensual vision of imaginary flowers and insects. Like Smith, she has a focus on the changing natural world, with small but dramatic environments in which the flora and fauna appear to come alive. These are intimate and moving images, part of a series, Botanica, the Secret Life of Flowers. While florals as a subject can be almost clichéd if the execution is not right, there is no such issue here. Far from it: she infuses each work with a sense of mood and place; the location may be imaginary but it is also rooted in realism. Some images feature environmental mutations in plants, while others depict pollinators facing threats from every side. It is a heightened, magical version of the real, one that very much evokes the fraught state of our planet today. Yet, while this state is revealed in her work, it is lush and gorgeous, a dichotomy of beauty existing while under siege. Her soft, highly textural “Spirits of The Hive,” seen above, glows with an almost transcendent light.
Martin’s paintings also touch on the natural world, but with a completely different way of depicting it. Using both deconstructed images and at times a “hi-tech auto finish” which she terms as being, at least in part, an homage to the car culture of Southern California, she captures an incandescent and geometric world. With the horizontal and vertical stripes of “South Coast Sunset,” for example, she gives us both deepening sky and setting sun amid the columns of a freeway overpass. The image feels dimensional and involving, as if one could step between those columns, and walk toward the sinking sun.
In contrast, Hoag’s work is entirely figurative. Human beings are the central subject of her paintings, and she works in a variety of mediums including acrylics, watercolor, and ink. Her palette varies by piece, and at times her image lean toward abstraction. Interestingly, with a college background focused on music, many of the artist’s images seem to emit an almost harmonic vibration, as if each individual image let loose a personal, visually-revealed “score.”
Hoag’s “Central Bark” is a wonderful depiction of city life, both human and canine. You can feel the hum of traffic, the excitement of the panting dogs. The wonderful look at a lively street scene in New York City is both urban and pastoral, with emerald park trees and furry, leashed friends paired with traffic, buildings, and busy people.
Churchill-Johnson combines realism with the abstract dramatically, examining what she terms “instant archeology” such as weeds growing in a pavement crack. She has used mirrored, kaleidoscopic techniques that remind the viewer of a galaxy, one in which the viewer is the center. Adding thin color glazes to her works, they have a shimmer that is both beautiful and surreal, or certainly hyper-realistic. In her works, too, environmental disaster looms just out of sight, indicative of climate change, and the minuteness of humankind in the greater world. One can almost feel the folds and wrinkles on the petals of her “Inner Hydrangea,” where dew drops resemble jewels or tears.
REH Fine Art at Grayspace is located at 219 Gray Avenue, in the Funk Zone of
Santa Barbara. Social distancing and face covering required, and appointments encouraged during regular gallery hours Friday-Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. through October 11th. The in-person opening is from 5 to 8 September 18th; you can also view art works on Instagram @Grayspacesp