A mostly self-educated artist with an international career, Irma Cavat’s focus on the creation of often amusing, occasionally disquieting images spanned more than seven decades. Legacy Art Santa Barbara Gallery owner Crispin Barrymore and director Laela Duncan offered my family a rare opportunity to display my mother’s art for three glorious months. The first impression upon walking into this dizzying collection is simply awe. Paintings glitter, sway, and luxuriate in gentle pools of light. Watercolors of upstate New York, the French countryside, and elsewhere offer portals into other worlds. A Picasso-esque pillow of canvas and black velvet peeks at you from a windowsill.
After more than a decade of living primarily in Italy, Irma moved to Santa Barbara with my sister Karina and me in 1963. She eventually became a fully tenured Professor of Art at UCSB, and it is here in our lovely seaside town that she created a breath-takingly diverse body of work. She used to say that the light here was identical to the light that shone on the ochre roofs of Rome, a light that drew her back to the easel repeatedly.
Born on November 23, 1925, in Brooklyn, my mother became part of the Abstract Expressionist group of artists when she was a younger artist living in New York City in the 1950s. She hung out with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, and Larry Rivers, amongst others. They shared meals, swapped ideas, and supported one another through lean and prosperous times.