In a city rife with artists working in the vein of traditional landscape painting, and often with considerable skill and sensitivity, the exhibition New Landscapes Part I, at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery, stands apart and offers alternative visions. More precisely, the show offers six alternative contemporary landscape variations — the number of artists and artworks in this initial run in the two-part series.
Curated by the gallery director John Connelly, the selection highlights the diversity of personal artistic approaches to the time-honored culture of art celebrating landscape, seascape, and urban settings. Most of the pieces also come equipped with agendas reframing old norms and assumptions about what landscape art is and can be.
Whitney Bedford, also currently showing her work in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Inside/Outside show in the contemporary gallery, supplies the Atkinson show’s epic centerpiece, “Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Morning) Triptych,” consuming one gallery wall. But despite its massive scale, the three-panel painting is less brashly monumental than it is meditative, with landscape and garden references layered and softened by a post-post-impressionist quality reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s palette and eye.
