Phoebe Brunner
Big Love, 2017
160575
OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2018, FROM 5 - 8PM
Sullivan Goss is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition for Phoebe Brunner.
What makes Phoebe’s paintings so desirable? Every inch of Brunner’s paintings is vibrant and in motion. The thick impasto of paint forms juicy layers of color that undulate like peaks of whipped buttercream frosting, creating waves of momentum from one part of the canvas to the next.
This latest body of work connects to the earth around us as it regenerates from a long lack of rain. Poppies explode, scattering their seeds to the wind for the next season of flowers. Roads lead through winding hills verdant with fresh grass. Clouds settle in to canyons to coat the hills with moisture. While her views are primarily imaginative, we are drawn to them by sense of memory for a place we have visited or more accurately, the familiarity of worlds we have wandered in our dreams.
This remarkable group of paintings reminds us to take a collective breath. Spring is coming, bringing regeneration and a continuation of nature’s endless cycle.
Phoebe earned a BFA from UCSB, but she also trained at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard, and the University of Guadalajara. She has been exhibiting in the Santa Barbara area for forty years. Brunner brings a local’s knowledge of the terrain together with a visionary artist’s sense of interpretation.
And then there is Phoebe Brunner, the distinctive and dream-dusted landscape painter whose own new work can be seen in the front of this very building, in the form of her show “Breathe.”
As usual, like a traditional landscape artist, Ms. Brunner summons up elemental natural forces and forms, but always with at least a semblance of surrealism tossed into the recipe. She has created a special dimension to call her own, as if the influence of dreams or other reality-altering influences have led her to new vistas, off to the left of the world we know. And she continues to paint this “place,” knowingly and assuredly.
