First let me apologize to my email subscribers who will no doubt get this in their inbox after 1st Thursday… for those people let me suggest that you check out these places AFTER 1st Thursday. Just because these shows open tonight, they’ll be up for a while. So, if you missed any of these places while you were out and about tonight, go back and check them out some other time.

Anyway, these places are all worth a visit and have exciting shows up. If you join me on tonight’s Art Crawl through 1st Thursday, we’ll stop by many of these.

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Wall space gallery

113 West Ortega St

Santa Barbara, California 93101

            805.637.3898

gallery@wall-spacegallery.com

Carl Corey

Wisconsin Tavern League

1-26 February 2012

Artist Reception and Book Signing

During First Thursday’s ArtWalk, 6 to 8pm

Wall space is thrilled to announce an exhibition of Carl Corey’s Wisconsin Tavern League, a celebration of the community and spaces where the people of rural Wisconsin gather.

Join us on Thursday night February 2nd, have a beer, meet Carl and see the people and places of the League.

About Carl -

Carl Corey, (b. 1954) currently residing in Wisconsin, received an Associates Degree in Graphic Design from Northern Illinois University and a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts, College of Cinema & Photography from Southern Illinois University. A career-artist since 1979, Carl has instructed workshops for the Advertising Photographers of America, The Society of Artists and Photographers Representatives, Peninsula Art School, Northern Illinois University and Purdue University. He counts Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Paul Caponigro, Eliot Porter and Irving Penn as influences on his photography. The recipient of over 100 awards from the advertising, design, and photography communities. Since 2000 Carl has directed his energy to more personal work focusing on social/aesthetic issues of the environment and the landscape.

His work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including recent shows in Seattle, Madison, Kansas City, and Hong Kong. Corey’s award-winning photographs can be found in museum, corporate, and private collections.

For more information about Carl, any of these images, or the gallery please contact us.

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Observations

time & place

Photographs by Jesse Alexander and Patricia Houghton Clarke

2 – 25 February, 2012

Gallery 27
Brooks Institute of Photography
27 East Cota Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Artist Reception

First Thursday – February 2, 2012
6 – 8 pm

The creative works of Santa Barbara artists Jesse Alexander and Patricia Houghton
Clarke are on the walls of Gallery 27 this February. This collaborative effort between two
photographic talents is a discussion of place, people and ideas.
Jesse Alexander and Patricia Houghton Clarke are creative documentarians, both
exposing the people and places of cultures we don’t often see, or pass by without
notice. These two artists allow us to see not only across the generations of ideas, but
how our visual language has changed, or conversely, remained the same over time.
Both photographers are deeply involved in their subject, finding nuance in shadows,
order in chaos. Both see in black and white and color. Both using light and shadow to tell
their story. While these are two photographers at different points in their careers, we see
their similarities in light and form, capturing the human spirit.

CONTACT:

Patricia Houghton Clarke
805.452.7739 – www.patriciahoughtonclarke.com
pcphotog@gmail.com
Gallery 27/Brooks Institute: 805.617.4503
Facebook: Brooks Institute Gallery 27

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Gina Werfel / POLYPHONICS  

Developing from her earlier plein-air work, Werfel’s recent paintings consider natural forces through a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction. The oil on canvas and works on paper display deconstructed landforms with energized figures pulsing through them. Energetic paint strokes and merging color washes evoke the transitory instability of the landscape we inhabit. Elsewhere, diagonal marks lead the eye into fragile webs of color from which can be gleaned the artist’s local verdant landscape of northern California and recent stays in France and Italy. Werfel transports the viewer through urban sprawl, leafy foliage and towards the calm waters of the Mediterranean by means of wide, loose brushstrokes and atmospheric color. The paintings combine the sun-drenched lighting and colorful richness of the Venetian School with the bold, evocative mark making of the Abstract Expressionists to present renderings of fragmentary, chaotic spaces.

The title of the exhibition makes reference to the musicality that emerges from the paintings. In a fashion reminiscent of Kandinsky, Werfel’s patterns of juxtaposing colors and shapes link to musical arrangements. The paintings contain both lyricism and spontaneity; abstractions emerge from the canvas like jazz improvisations. Works such as Dancer present the human figure in motion, interacting with the surrounding landscape. The human and nature at times dissolve and intermix in dynamic sequences of paint. Werfel’s work continually brings the viewer back to the matter of boundaries: between figuration and abstraction, order and chaos, nature and human.  

Happy New Year, one and all. I hope you all had a great holiday season and are ready to get the new year started. We are going to start 2012 off with a less frantic version of the monthly 1st Thursday Art Crawl. This should allow us to take a bit more time at each location and soak in the art more thoroughly. We will end the night at the studio of one of Santa Barbara’s most talented young painters, Derek Harrison. After missing his studio last month because of a miss-communication, we are back on track for this month. It should be a great night, and I hoping to see another big crowd join us for the evening.

You can find a map of the proposed itinerary below. The Art Crawl starts PROMPTLY at 5:45, so if you can’t make it at the beginning, use the map to track us down. I also usually update our location live on twitter.

See you on Thursday!

Click on the image below for a larger, printable version of the map.

After a hiatus from the Downtown Organizations’s 1st Thursday last month, I’m back for the last Art Crawl of the year and this is going to be an extra special event. First of all, I am going to focus on many of the venues that have previously been neglected for one reason or another. We will start on the southern-most part of the festivities and will work our way up to a last stop at one of my favorite local artist’s studio near the Arlington theater. This means that we’ll be doing a bit more walking than usual, so make sure to eat before you come and wear comfortable shoes. It also mean that we will stop at fewer places than usual so we have time to take in these new places.

Joining us for at least part of the evening will be a group of revelers from Repeal Day Santa Barbara. Monday December 5th is the anniversary of the day that prohibition was repealed. They have some big festivities planned for the entire weekend and they start the whole shebang off with the Art Crawl.

I’ve posted a map of the tentative itinerary below. Click on the map to see an enlarged version. If you want to join us, make sure to be at Wall Space Gallery before 6pm. We will leave there promptly to make sure we have time to get everywhere.

Finally, the Art Crawl has a new site on Meetup.com. Check it out. I wasn’t familiar with it until recently, but it ends up being a pretty great online site for organizing in person events.

I hope to see you on Thursday!

Start being jealous of me. In two days I am going on wild adventure that will send me to the far side of the country and leave me with a cross-country road trip back home. I’ve done portions of this epic journey a couple of times, but never have I done it all in one go, and I’ll be doing it solo. Hopefully you understand my excitement, though I’m sure there are those of you who think I’m crazy.

Regardless, this will mean that the blog is going to go radio silent for the better part of two weeks, which will mean that my usual monthly 1st Thursday preview will not happen. Nor will I have time to publicize the next round of Art in the Mayor’s Office, which will be happening from 5 – 6 on that evening (the office will close at 6 sharp, so get there on time).  And what about the 1st Thursday Art Crawl? I should be screaming back into town just in time to lead the troops on the repetitious flash mob that we enact upon local galleries that night.  If you want to join the Art Crawl, meet me on the back steps of City Hall promptly at 5:30. You should also check out the Art Crawl group that started at Meetup.com. This is a really cool website that uses virtual connections to organize face-to-face gatherings, and the Art Crawl already has a loyal following of over 30 strong (Thanks, Chris).

Finally I won’t have time to highlight this really important seminar at the Contemporary Arts Forum. For any of you who have aspirations of being a career artist, this is a requirement. There will be a quiz afterwards.

I’m sure there are many other events that I am going to miss over the next two weeks, so please do us all a favor by posting  comments on this post to let people know what is up while I am gone.

Also, I’ll be posting pictures of any of the iconic road trip things that I see upon the way on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/sbartsblog

The Road Trip: A Defining Part of the American Grand Narrative

After taking a hiatus from doing the Art Crawl every month, I’m happy to announce that this month it is back by popular demand. It is the end of Summer and the weather couldn’t be better so it is the perfect time to get back into the festivities.

The original idea behind the Art Crawl was to get a critical mass of art-loving people together under the banner of the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, to show gallery owners and 1st Thursday attendees in general that we could rally the troops when it came to getting people excited about the local art scene. We were able to get a wonderfully diverse crowd including local artists and art collectors, to tourists who just happened to be visiting town.

This month we will once again be trying to hit the full spectrum of what 1st Thursday has to offer, from plein-air paintings, to cutting-edge emerging artists. Throw a few live bands into the mix and possibly a glass of wine or two and a good time is all but guaranteed.

All you have to do to be part of the Art Crawl is show up. I’ll be the Pied-Piper for the evening, and will be happy to answer any questions you may have about what we see during the evening, the local art scene, or how to get into art collecting generally.

The map below outlines our tentative itinerary. If you can’t join us right at 5:30, I’ll be updating our location on Twitter throughout the night, so come and catch up to us whenever.

UPDATE: We’ll also be making a stop at a sculpture show at VIVA design studio at 123 E. Carrillo. More info on the event here:

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=34e727a4ae82e086c1ea29091&id=b25bf2ef54&e=[UNIQID]