Contemporary Fine Art of Santa Barbara
Corridan Gallery Exhibit February 7 through March 28, 2015
“INTO THE CITY”
Santa Barbara Artists Painting Urban Landscapes
Featuring: JUDY NIENOW, WARNER NIENOW & SOPHIE COOPER
CORRIDAN GALLERY is proud to present Oil Paintings of Architecture and Urban Scenes. The exhibit features three of Santa Barbara's finest Oil Painters;
Judy Nienow
Sophie Cooper
Warner Nienow
JUDY NIENOW, WARNER NIENOW and SOPHIE COOPER. These painters take us on a tour of international cities starting in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles we continue on, going from New York to St. Petersburg, from Paris and Venice to Tokyo. We travel by train, automobile and on foot, as one should to really see these great cities. We focus our vision on beautifully composed and powerful views of metropolitan life. Each artist gives us a different experience as we venture Into the City.
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"Tower in Dowmtown LA"
JUDY NIENOW's exciting oil painting titled, "Into the City" is the inspiration for this show. Here she pictures driving into Westwood on Wilshire Blvd. The towering buildings lining the boulevard show the results of the growth of West Los Angeles in the past 50 years. Like this piece, many of her cityscapes put things in motion; people on the move, traffic, even escalators pulse with the energy of the city. Her architectural paintings capture soaring heights and deep perspectives in soft painterly tonalities.
"Down Towards the City"
WARNER NIENOW's urban landscapes take inspiration from the work of Edward Hopper and Santa Barbara artists Patricia Chidlaw and Thomas Van Stein. His formal training under Claude Buck, master of Poetic Realism, gave him the background of classical painting technique that has played so well in his later work. He has become well known for his nocturnal street scenes. While many of his paintings tell a story in visual terms similar to Hopper, they also have the strong geometric forms and values of abstract composition. This solid compositional quality carries into his recent daytime urban landscapes and charming paintings of international eateries.
"59 Palms on Cabrillo Blvd"
"Joe's Corner"
"Five Fifteen"
SOPHIE COOPER has developed a unique perspective with her recent Cityscapes. In "The Water Tank Series", the paintings all portray water tanks in New York City. With this concept as a starting point her view of the city and the resulting paintings have a distinctive effect. Looking upward, many of the pieces capture light and color reminiscent of Charles Sheeler's early 20th Century Urban Landscapes. Others plunge into the dark moods of the city at night.
She is drawn to angular, massive, powerful shapes. From these she extracts an abstract geometry of large, simple shapes forming a solid base and joins them with smaller delicate forms to complete the composition. In her most recent works the water tanks have become subordinate to larger structures. She depicts overhead train systems and huge skyscrapers. The paintings capture the complexity of signage, buildings and traffic that make the city the unique environment that it is.
Visit the Corridan Gallery from February 7 through March 28 and take a trip with us to the great cities of the world.
"Nishi's Room"
CORRIDAN GALLERY
125 North Milpas Street, Santa Barbara CA 93103
Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11 to 6, or call for other hours
karen@corridan-gallery.com or (805) 966-7939