Seven artists recently assembled to showcase their varying media, diverse perspectives, and different artistic approaches in Gallery Los Olivos’ latest group exhibition, New Perspectives. One of the featured painters, Marcia Burtt, also served as curator and coordinator for the show.
“Pulling together such widely different points of view felt like a challenge,” said Burtt, who’s locally known as a prolific acrylic painter and as the owner of Marcia Burtt Gallery in downtown Santa Barbara.
One of Burtt’s favorite things about organizing and participating in this year’s edition of New Perspectives—which will remain on display at Gallery Los Olivos through Saturday, April 30—was getting to know the other artists involved, many of whom she hadn’t met before. The purpose of this periodic exhibit, traditionally held every two years, is to showcase a batch of the gallery’s newest recruits.
“Because this show features artists who are all recent additions to Gallery Los Olivos, most of us didn’t know each other,” Burtt said. “I was very excited to see every single person’s work and particularly happy to see some very different approaches.”
Burtt said there was “art chat galore” when the seven artists first met as a group to start collaborating on the exhibit, and that she made new friends right away.
“Each of us brought an assortment of work; just pieces we had ready to put on the wall at the moment,” Burtt said of the collaborative showcase, which premiered at the gallery at the end of March.
Burtt’s six peers featured in the exhibit are fellow artists Karen Scott Browdy, Britt Friedman, Pamela Larsson-Toscher, Ginny Speirs, Sherri Cassell, and Emil Morhardt.
Almost all of the pieces in the show are paintings (acrylic, oil, etc., depending on the artist), minus a unique collection of “intricate tongue-in-cheek assemblages,” by Browdy, Burtt said. Browdy uses and combines several kinds of three-dimensional objects to craft her creations.
Larsson-Toscher has some “large tapestry-like paintings, augmented with smaller illustrative figure paintings” highlighted in the show, Burtt said, while Speirs’ featured pieces are “small, energetic close-ups of vegetable and flower life.”
The remainder of the exhibit is enveloped in landscapes by Friedman, Cassell, and Burtt, and “big, striking images of owls and hawks” by Morhardt, Burtt described. Based in Santa Barbara, Morhardt is an artist well known for his highly detailed bird paintings, which he bases off his own photographs.
When pressed to name her single favorite piece in the group show, Burtt would rank Pacific Coast Series 5, a colorful oil painting by Friedman, at the top of her list.
For Burtt, seeing each of the seven featured artists’ various artworks displayed side by side in the exhibit adds a unique layer that goes beyond viewing each piece individually. The curator used her response to seeing Morhardt’s sparrow hawk painting, American Kestrel, hung alongside Larsson-Toscher’s Danger—a vivid painting of a snake—and Spiers’ Spinning—a plant still life—as an example.
“I was most touched by how the coloring in a Morhardt hawk brought out warmth in a Spiers succulent and the luscious golden snake in Larsson-Toscher’s large piece,” Burtt said.
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is a proud Slitherin. Send comments in Parseltongue to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 21-28, 2022.
