Impromptu

Our artists interpret landscape using chance and expressive style, revealing poetry in their process as well as in their choice of subject.

In Morro Rock, Randall David Tipton envelops the giant volcanic plug in a humid atmosphere. Painting with watercolor on smooth paper, Tipton relinquishes control of the paints to the slick surface. Pooling and dripping blues, reds, and browns radiate into one another—equal parts watery world and action painting.

What begins at the top as a distant ocean view evolves into an increasingly painterly abstraction in Robert Abbott's Backlit Hills. Abbott's gloppy dabs of greens and browns push into and on top of one another, forming the foreground's tactile hills, trees, and bushes.

Swatches of blues, greens, and greyed yellows comprise Marcia Burtt's Spring, Goleta Beach. Burtt doesn't blend the colors; each stroke layers next to or onto another. The ocean is a battle between a layer of white foam and a serpentine swish of blue strokes. She conveys the joy of playing with paint on a spring day at the beach by letting her technique stay visible.

Susan Petty focuses on a single cumulonimbus in her painting Building. She constructs the cloud with blue-grey watercolor, layering over and blending in: by allowing the granulating pigment to spread and cluster, she adds depth and texture to the towering dramatic storm cloud.

Anne Ward's New Plantings is a tangle of leaves and flowers. Her layered translucent strokes of paint fill the entire panel, animating it from corner to corner. Ward captures the excitement of spring gardening by means of her bold and energetic painting practice.

The rough pencil sketch in Marilee Krause's Open Space is more a suggestion than a guide. Blue mountains seep into shrubs, and green clumps root into ochre earth. The edge of her brush and the flow of the watercolors define the stacked shapes in Krause's playful cross-section of a big landscape on a small piece of paper.

Meg Torbert painted paintings over paintings, layering veils of imagery. Her rapid swipes convey a need to record the thought before it fades away. The staircase, architectural elements, and expanding and contracting space are impressions of reality — explorations on how to portray memories.

Patricia Doyle's brush strokes match the rhythm of the waves in Water Music. Her gestures create splashes and dashes of blues and greens, crisscrossing white water and black rocks. She captures the sound of the water visually, an impromptu on the ocean's endless motion.