Relatives | Recent Paintings by Leslie Lewis Sigler
Architectural Foundation Gallery
229 E. Victoria Street
Santa Barbara, CA

March 8 – April 12, 2013
Opening Reception Friday, March 8, 5 – 7 pm
1st Thursday Reception, Thursday April 4, 5 – 8 pm

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Friday
9 am – 2 pm

December 6, 2012 to February 3, 2013, Sullivan Goss presents 100 Grand, their fourth annual salon exhibition of one hundred art works priced at $1,000 or less. My piece, Kinfolk (above), will be in the exhibition. Come out December 6, also First Thursday (and downtown Santa Barbara will be festive with the holiday season), to the opening reception from 5-8pm.

100 Grand
Sullivan Goss
7 East Anapamu Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

December 6, 2012 to February 3, 2013
Opening Reception December 6, 2012, 5-8pm

Gallery Hours:
Mon-Sun 10:3oam-5pm

If the everyday household stuff of cutlery, shirts, silver vessels and crackers seem less than worthy of serious artistic reflection and passion, think again. With the two-person show called “Oil & Water,” part of the ongoing series of worthy art shows at the Santa Barbara Tennis Club, Santa Barbara artists Leslie Lewis Sigler and Lily Guild — the former working in oil, the latter working in watercolor and graphite — confer the dignity of their serious artistic skills and attentions on household matters, and to surprisingly meditative and considered ends.

Sigler, whose presence around the local art scene included a show at the Faulkner Gallery (recently reviewed in these pages) is a strong painter specializing in still life canvases of silverware. Guild’s artistic efforts have gone mostly into graphic arts and design, but her impressive work here makes us wish she’d delve into the gallery sphere more often.

Together, this cohesive show basks in self-aware subtlety and delicacy, but also humor and the hypnotic sum effect of multiple small variations. Both artist have settled on highly selective, self-limited themes and supposedly mundane subject matter, and their exacting, understated style of rendering draws our senses inward to a unique artistic space and a rather strangely contemplative state of mind.

On the first wall of the designed artspace of the Tennis Club lobby, Sigler show a series of luminously painted forks, varied in size and style and presented with a whimsical stateliness on small, vertical formatted canvases. More eloquent utensil still life paintings can be found deeper into the exhibition, as well as shimmering espresso vessels of a series she calls “The Ritual” (we assume she’s a caffein affine, turning her vice into art fodder).

Sigler may find her inspiration in the kitchen and dining room silver drawers, and wherever precious silver lurks. Guild’s primary body of work here comes from the closet. She has deftly created a beguiling set, 36 in all, of small images of shirts, in the series she coyly dubs “Lilywhite Shirts.” The shirts pictures, cleanly realized in graphite and watercolor, amount to posed shirt “portraits,” configured on hangers and floating against white voids. With these, Guild captures the literal feel and the dimensionality of the garments, in line, fold, texture, fabric quality, and give.

From quite another part of the house, Guild further demonstrates her calm aplomb with studies of crackers — all manner thereof, for both human and canine consumption. She also lends her cool hand and eye to discrete, porous pieces of toast, sometimes half-eaten.

This consumable subject series might smack of some post-ironic, post Pop Art strategy at work, but Guild manages to sidestep the wink-wink air of novelty. There is a dry, lightly crunchy wit and grace to her art, individually and as a collective, rhythmic whole. She seems committed to the project at hand, without over-thinking or overselling.

For anyone who stops to notice the deceptively quiet art here, a gentle breeze of serendipitous beauty can be sensed blowing through the roon. Who knew the potentially transformative power of shirts and forks?

I’ll be exhibiting new work at the gallery space at the Tennis Club of Santa Barbara May 11 – June 2, 2012. Save the date and please join us for an opening reception on Friday, May 11 from 5:30 – 7:30 pm.

Oil & Water
Tennis Club of Santa Barbara
2375 Foothill Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93105

May 11 – June 2, 2012
Reception Friday, May 11, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Gallery Hours 10 am – 9 pm daily

December 1, 2011 to January 29, 2012, Sullivan Goss presents 100 Grand, their third annual salon exhibition of one hundred art works priced at $1,000 or less. This year I’m excited to be included in the exhibition. Come out December 1, also First Thursday (and downtown Santa Barbara will be festive with the holiday season), to the opening reception from 5-8pm.

100 Grand
Sullivan Goss
7 East Anapamu Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

December 1, 2011 to January 29, 2011
Opening Reception December 1, 2011, 5-8pm

Gallery Hours:
Mon-Sun 10:3oam-5pm

Over 400 artist have been invited and have submitted work to Westmont Museum of Art’s 5×5: An Invitational. I’m honored to be included. Each piece—created on a provided 5×5 piece of paper—will available for purchase via online auction, the proceeds of which will benefit Westmont Museum of Art.

5×5: An Invitational
Westmont Museum of Art
November 30 – December 16, 2011
Reception Wednesday, November 30, 4-6 p.m.
Online auction opens at 4 p.m. November 30 and closes at 5 p.m. December 16, PST
Learn more about the auction here.

Two of my paintings were accepted to Small Images, Santa Barbara City College’s annual juried exhibit. This year’s juror was Miki Garcia, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Small Images opens September 30 and runs until October 28th.

Santa Barbara’s Art From Scrap is celebrating it’s 20th anniversary with an exciting fundraising event called One Night Stand and I’m honored to be participating.

One Night Stand is a benefit in support of Art From Scrap, a leading environmental education and art organization, now in its 20th year of encouraging creative expression in the arts and promoting a greater understanding of environmental issues.

This art exhibition will be up for one night only – Saturday August 20, 2011 – at Gallery 27, a professional art gallery affiliated with Brooks Institute in downtown Santa Barbara. Contemporary artists from around the country are being personally invited to contribute artwork in all mediums. Over 200 artist have donated work to the fundraiser.

The element of surprise is essential to One Night Stand. The artist’s name will only be revealed after the artwork is purchased. Sophisticated art patrons and first time collectors will trust their instincts as they hunt for works of art that both intrigue and excite their sensibilities. Once selected, each work of art will be purchased for $200.

Learn more about One Night Stand and how to purchase tickets here: www.onenightstandafs.com.

ALMOST FORGOTTEN: It’s easy to forget about East and West Faulkner (40 E. Anapamu St.), the two little galleries adjacent to the public library’s main exhibition space. This month, it’s worth re-familiarizing yourself, though.

Through the end of July, West Faulkner is filled with an assortment of family heirlooms à la Antiques Roadshow, all classically rendered in oils. Leslie Lewis Sigler calls this collection of still-life paintings Objects of My Reflection, which is both a straightforward description and a play on words. In the mirror-like flanks of a convex sugar bowl or the polished silver of a vintage coffeepot, the artist captures refracted light and patches of darkness. Is that smear of peachy pink cast by a setting sun, or by the hue of her cheek as she leans in for a closer look?

Sigler’s subjects include old-fashioned cameras, vintage fans, and a china cabinet’s worth of tea sets. She’s interested not just in the classic lines and reflective surfaces of these nostalgic objects, but in the roles they play in our lives—treasured, yet no longer utilized, and often stored away from view. She treats each piece with loving attention, yet pictures them in isolation, standing on flat planes, accompanied by little but their own shadows. “Cameo” pictures a lonely rotary telephone in profile, as if it’s sitting for a formal portrait, while “Revival” and “The Wedding Gift” each consist of four canvases; every pitcher and every teacup occupying a world unto itself. There’s a sadness here, and a world of nostalgic wonder, much like you’d find in an antique store where relics stir ancient memories of places and people long gone and half forgotten. For more about the artist, visit leslielewissigler.com.

ART REVIEW : Back in Optical Action – After being closed to the public for renovations, the downtown public library’s grand Faulkner Gallery has re-opened, reminding us of its importance as a centralizing cultural force

LESLIE LEWIS SIGLER, ‘OBJECTS OF MY REFLECTION’
By JOSEF WOODARD, NEWS-PRESS CORESPONDENT
July 8, 2011
When: through July 30
Where: Faulkner Gallery West, Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 E. Anapamu St.
Gallery Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday
Information: 564-5608, sbplibrary.org

Walking into the newly reopened and renovated Faulkner Gallery in the downtown library, you might find yourself feeling a bit more warm and tingly than before. Absence has made the heart grow fonder, as the large gallery, cultural center and social gathering hall has been closed to the public for a couple of months, for renovation.

Whereas we might take this space — actually, one large, tall-ceilinged room and two small flanking galleries — for granted, the Faulkner is actually an important, anchoring cultural presence downtown, regardless of what art is on view here. With the Museum of Art just across the courtyard, and the Sullivan Goss and Channing Peake galleries across the street, the Faulkner is literally in the center of artistic action, and has a democratic reach, to members of the public not necessarily plugged into the comings and goings of art.

In the current list of exhibitions here in the new, improved Faulkner complex, the largest spread goes to the SCAPE landscape art consortium. Among the more impressive works in the densely populated show are the ruggedly brushed “Valley at Dusk” by ccc and Margaret Nadeau’s “Showers are Coming,” conveying an air pregnant with impending precipitation. Filiberto Lomeli’s “Ocean View” is a seascape with a difference, a mystical light source on the ocean’s horizon, and Suzan Dougall Christenson’s “Summer in the Sierras” is an etude in rolling, lulling hillside contours and arid beauty.

Back in the small Faulkner Gallery East, David Orias’ kindly “Reflecting on Waves” photography show lovingly details oceanic action. Traditional wave-obsessive ocean photography mixes in with painting-like textured photographs on canvas. By land, he shows some standard photo op favorites in SoCal, from the Santa Barbara Mission to the shimmering arcs — waves, come to think of it — of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall architectural showpiece and landmark.

The most compelling show in the building is in Faulkner Gallery West, Leslie Lewis Sigler’s quite lovely painting show “Objects of my Reflection.” This is Sigler’s first solo show, and it makes for a good impression, in terms of single images and the cohesive, calmly expressive élan of the whole.

In this show, Sigler brings a meditative, realistic still life aesthetic, a painterly eye and attention to objects both mundane and ceremonial. Shiny sterling silver vessels and heirlooms hang happily alongside lovingly fastidious paintings of a desk fan, an espresso pot and a vintage telephone, looking gracefully iconic in this setting.

Some of the more “precious” objects and heirlooms are presented in triptychs and other multiple panel contexts, giving works like “Revival” and “Family of Heirlooms” the character of personality-endowed object worship and transformation into art. From the evidence here, Sigler has a real gift, as a painter and thinker about how painting functions.

See it now, in your public library.