Sullivan Goss – An American Gallery is pleased to present our newest exhibition, ROBIN GOWEN: The Color of Shadow & The Texture of Light, the gallery’s sixth solo show for the artist. Gowen’s latest body of work brings a new concern for texture and pattern to her approach to landscape painting. Just as autumn brings a sense of renaissance - that primal back-to-school feeling that signals the reinvention of style - much of Gowen’s work has a new color palette and a new way of laying up paint. Of course, her interest in the luminescent landscape still abides.

The surging interest in texture in Gowen’s new paintings can be clearly seen in a close-up study of scarlet pimpernel on a blazing hot day in the valley. The large color forms that once defined her hills now bear more than the painterly traces of their creation; they are now formed by daubs of harmonic colors that suggest the texture of wavy grasses bathed in afternoon sun and enlivened by summer breezes. Ever concerned with the rhythm of California’s remarkable hills, Robin has added syncopation with these new patterns.  Patterns of hills rising and falling towards the horizon are now echoed in the warp and  weft of the patterns within the hills.  Robin Gowen’s new  paintings conjure thoughts of Pointillism, of tapesties, and of Gustav Klimt’s early, jewel-like paintings.

When asked to describe her new body of work, Gowen kept returning to the word, “tapestries.” And indeed, the paintings in this exhibition hearken to the patterns and textures of nature’s loom. Gowen’s new style harmonizes with that metaphor. Small brushstrokes, lovingly and carefully applied, combine to form panoramic vistas that impress from a distance and inspire us with the dedication recorded in their fabrication.

Robin Gowen was the first contemporary artist to show with Sullivan Goss. She not only paints, she is a published author and the wife of the Dean of the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, whose many trips to study geology and paleobotany in the field have provided the artist with opportunities to travel and paint.

Opening Reception: 1st October 6th,  2011, from 5 – 8 pm

Also on view: LA’s RISEN through October 30, 2011, Angela Perko through November 27, 2011