Final Exhibit Pays Tribute to Golden State
Westmont closes out the Reynolds Gallery season with a celebration of California’s beauty through a special invitational show featuring some of the region’s finest landscape painters. “Views and Visions: Celebrating California,” will be at the gallery from Thursday, May 18, through June 30. An opening reception will be held Thursday, May 18, at 4 p.m.
The gallery typically ends the season with a Santa Barbara invitational, and this year will start a new tradition of featuring a Westmont alum. Cory Steffen is art director for Santa Barbara-based Flavia Company, an art licensing company and design studio. He graduated from Westmont in 1996.
“Recently, I’ve been doing landscapes, big clouds, wheat fields, middle-America,” says Steffen. “I’ve been drawn to California’s golden hills and oak trees as of late.”
“Both the paintings he has in the exhibit really celebrate the unique landscape of colors of California,” says Tony Askew, Westmont art professor and gallery director. “This show is designed to celebrate many aspects of California, including paintings of the rodeo, flamenco dancer, Ballard Store, local landscape and, of course, the traditional California poppy, Santa Barbara Mission and the Moreton Bay fig tree.”
The exhibit also features the oil paintings of well-known Santa Barbara artist Meredith Brooks Abbott and her daughter, Whitney Abbott.
Twenty-two different artists are featured in the exhibit, utilizing photography, print, water color and oil paintings.
“In all this year’s exhibits we celebrated California,” says Askew, “starting out with Richard Diebenkorn and his unique take on the Santa Cruz Islands and then Pasadena artist R. Kenton Nelson who celebrated the nostalgia of California with his kind of 30s and 40s New Yorker imagery, then culminating in this year’s “Views and Visions” to celebrate various aspects of California.”
The gallery is free and open to the public 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. For more information please call the gallery office at (805) 565-6162. For directions, please visit our Web site at www.westmont.edu.