“Whatever’s going on in the world ends up in your work. I like the idea of painters being witnesses — of showing truth as it is. I like painters being able to develop and discover an image of who we are.” This is how Hank Pitcher describes the intention behind his latest work, an exhilarating and career-defining series that’s now on view at Sullivan Goss in a show called Primal. After writing a story about the venerated painter in this paper two years ago, Pitcher and I have become best friends. He’s invited me to his studio for long chats about art and life. Late last spring in 2018, when Pitcher summoned me to see his latest work, he mentioned on the phone that it was a response to the disasters of January 2018. Bracing for the worst, I drove to his studio expecting bleak images of nature devastated. Instead my heart stopped as I walked into his workspace. Yes, I could see the landscape paintings he’s known for, as well as his iconic surfboards. Yet I saw canvases bursting with exhilarating colors and kinetic compositions that instilled a visceral reaction like I’d never experienced before in Pitcher’s oeuvre. Most importantly, I understood the complexity to this set of paintings, comprising three different groups. Each of them deals with one of three important issues that our community — and our nation — is currently grappling with: immigration, the environment, and recovery from disaster. “All of these things are fundamental issues,” says Pitcher. “You look back to nature for answers. What are the essential issues? Making these paintings brings these questions up. I’m not trying to make political statements. Those political statements are in nature.”
Over the past six weeks, Pitcher and I met three times to discuss Primal, this sacred and profane new series that he started painting in February 2018.
January 16, 2019 — Immigration
“Everything is about everything else,” is how Pitcher greets me on an evening with heavy rain. Yet we share a sigh of relief that the storm hasn’t caused major damage like the year before. He’s quoting marine biotechnologist Dr. Kathy Foltz, who was interim dean of the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, where Pitcher has been teaching for decades. “In a welcome speech to the students at the beginning of her tenure, she said that ‘everything is about everything else,’ and I love that description of the interconnectedness of things. I love that it applies equally to atoms, parts of a painting, and to our place on the planet. Working with and sometimes teaching with the scientists at UCSB has informed my work and inspired me. I find that scientists tend to be much more creative and curious than artists.”
I stare at a particular group of paintings that are set in Point Conception. When he steps up on that Point, Pitcher can see his studio at UCSB — and the whole Gaviota Coast. “The winds blow so hard I have to hide in the weeds,” he explains. “There used to be a giant Victorian house up there. That’s a square piece of land which has mystical meaning for the Chumash. It is the gateway to the Western world.” He tells me there’s always some weird cloud formation. There’s a temperature differential on either side of the point — sometimes referred to as the “elbow for California” — for this is where the cold current coming out of the Pacific from Japan meets the warmer current of the Channel Islands. “I feel like a white man there,” Pitcher confides. “I feel like I’m on somebody else’s territory. Sometimes I feel at peace there, but most of the time it’s strange.” One of the most remarkable things about the flat part of Point Conception is the way that in the Point’s short spring between March and May, and at the same time when the wind blows its hardest, all varieties of different native and non-native plants are blooming at once. “It’s a funny metaphor for immigration issues,” observes Pitcher. “Simultaneously you have native Giant Coreopsis as well as aloes and ice plants from the coast of South Africa. The ice plant is invasive — it has just taken over a lot of grazing now that it has become ‘naturalized.’ When this simultaneous blooming of native and non-native plants happens, there’s a cacophony of colors and shapes. I’m looking at this same landscape and seeing it differently. I’m able to observe. This endangered plant blooms with these plants that are not native. The ice plant becomes stressed at this point. This idea of what is native — what should stay and what should go — is on my mind. How do you allow all the dreamers — if you allow everyone in? This is something that gets acted out in the landscape. I really don’t have an answer at all. The more I learn about ecology and the environment, the harder the question becomes. Where do you draw the line when something is not native?”
Besides the urgency in the themes of Pitcher’s new paintings, I notice something else unusual. Most of his paintings in his long career have been about the light at the end of the day. “Like the fall, the end of the day is about reflection,” he says. But these new paintings are about spring and depict the world as it appears in morning light, when things are in bloom.
“I think we’re in the beginning of something in our culture,” Pitcher reflects. “Something is blooming — the power of new life. I’m going to turn 70 this year. I’m still not able to fully accept that I can no longer physically do the things I did when I was in my twenties. I’m not physically strong enough to ride those waves anymore. One of the reasons I always wanted to be a painter was because I could do it until the very end. For a painter, the last paintings are the best paintings. I realize I’m at the beginning of a new stage in my life. What I can do now as an artist is take this talent and skill I’ve accumulated and decide what else I can do with it. As an artist, I feel something has just begun.”