Many Artists, Similar Styles, Techniques

Not long ago I drove to the other side of Lake Washington to visit the Howard/Mandville Gallery. It was having the opening reception for Wanderlust: Invitational Landscape Exhibition 2017.

I though most of the paintings on display were pleasant, and a few were very fine. But what struck me was how similar many of them seemed to one another, even allowing for the usual individual artistic personality differences.

Of course, subject matter can be a strong influence. I've mentioned now and then how similar many paintings of California landscapes can be. Then there is the fashion factor. Like the architecture of houses, it can be fairly easy to assign, within a decade or two, when certain paintings or illustrations were made. What I was viewing seems to be a currently popular approach to painting landscapes in the temperate zone of North America. I don't intend this a criticism. Almost all the works I viewed were pleasing.

The image at the top of this post is "Winter Silence" by Roger Dale Brown: I'll use it as an example. What is especially clear when seen in person is thinner, more free brushwork for incidental parts of the painting, though "incidental" might actually comprise much of the area of the canvas or panel. Contrasting this are more thickly painted, usually crisply defined details. In the above painting, the metal roof of the barn is an example of this. So are the tree branches shown against the sky -- the effect is wispy yet much of the detailing is sharp.

Gallery

"Valley Light" - Brian Blood

"The Soloist" - Shanna Kunz

"Road to the Forest" - David Lidbetter

"Remnants" - David Santillanes

"Ocher Landscape" - Andrew Skorut

"Old Barn in Autumn" - Romona Youngquist

The Gallery Scene

I really should devote more time to the gallery scene, but for some reason I get inhibited because I am not at all a buyer of serious art and don't want the sales people to get their hopes up. Nevertheless, I'm trying to shed this hangup. In March I actually did manage to prowl through some of the galleries along El Paseo in Palm Desert, California while my wife was in Indian Wells watching the tennis tournament. And a while ago I visited and wrote about my favorite Santa Barbara, California gallery.

El Paseo galleries run the painting gamut from modernist to semi-schlocky to traditional. As of early 2013, my favorite of the lot is the SR Brennen gallery that was displaying some works by contemporary artists that I'd previously viewed in art magazines and on Web sites. So I got a real treat.

Here are a few of the paintings I saw. The images are from the SR Brennen site linked in the previous paragraph.

Gallery

Daniel Greene: "Antiques Dealer with Folk Art"
Greene is a true veteran, pushing 80 years old, but still doing fine work. Some information about him is here.

Adrian Gottlieb: "Anticiaption"
Gottlieb, on the other hand, is under 40 and well launched on his career. Here is a post dealing with his technique at Matthew D. Innis' outstanding Underpaintings blog.

Steve Hanks: "Classical Elegance"
Hanks is a brave soul who works mostly in water-based media, though the results seem as solidly done as if they were in oil. Information about Hanks is here.

Nelson Shanks: "Salome"
I previously posted Shanks' "Salome" here, and plan to write more about him soon. For those interested in learning more about him click here.

Waterhouse Gallery, Santa Barbara

If you happen to find yourself in Santa Barbara, California and are hankering for viewing representational paintings, the Waterhouse Gallery should be on your to-see list.

It's tucked on the corner of an L-shaped pedestrian passageway (La Arcada) connecting the main drag (State Street) with East Figueroa Street, which runs at a right-angle to State. The image above shows the gallery from a small plaza at the angle of the L.

When I last visited, the gallery was having its annual Figurative Exhibition, a display of paintings by many of the better currently active painters who disdain abstraction and the edgy postmodern idiom.

The gallery is not large, so the paintings on view also tended to be of modest size and packed together. This was no problem, so far as I am concerned, because they were mostly up close and I could concentrate on nearly every one.

My main complaint is that the paintings lacked an accompanying label with the name of the artist and the title. I wonder why. One possible reason is that this forces the viewer to inquire the gallery staff, thereby starting a conversation that might lead to a sale. This is fine with capitalist tool me, though I can't afford quality paintings and would find it useful to simply gather information without interacting with the staff. However, the second link above is to the paintings on view and identifies who made them, so all was not totally lost.