Adrienne Allebe described how she allowed the unexpected to emerge in her mixed-media piece: After splashing a blank sheet of paper with a wave of watercolor, she tilted the canvas in different directions and watched the paint slide from side to side. As soon as vague shapes started to emerge, Allebe knew the direction she wanted to take with the piece, which she titled The Conjuring.
“I started to see skulls, so I brought that out of the washes of color,” said the local artist and teacher, whose creative process often revolves around the “unexpected imagery” she perceives after indiscriminately pouring, dripping, and splattering paint across an empty space.
“I have always been interested in the point at which we recognize visual information,” Allebe said. “I am currently striving to create that effect in which there is imagery hidden that slowly emerges, that you don’t quite see right away.”
Once the initial skull shapes dried, Allebe began her “next phase” of completing The Conjuring by adding layers of acrylic paint and colored pencil markings to the piece. Allebe described the final result as reminiscent of cover art for a heavy metal album or science fiction novel.
“I wanted to create something that felt like a dark force emerging and overtaking society,” Allebe said. “One of my friends said it looks like ‘a ghost ship on a blood sea,’ and I love this interpretation. It’s so much more fun for me to hear others’ interpretations than explain my work.”
The Conjuring is currently on display at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery (located at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria), along with three equally haunting artworks by Allebe.
“I feel like all four have a little more grit and creepiness than my work usually has, and I view this as a personal accomplishment,” Allebe explained. “I feel like I achieved an unsettling mood in them, which is usually difficult for me to achieve—I always end up making my drawings look too pleasant and pretty.”
The Ann Foxworthy Gallery is showcasing these four pieces as part of its current group show—a collection of artworks created by members of Hancock College’s fine arts faculty.
Allebe currently teaches classes in drawing, design, and art appreciation at the college, where she has worked since 2017. Other featured instructors in the exhibit include Patrick Trimbath, who started teaching at Hancock in 2010.
“The people there make it a wonderful place to teach at. Students, staff, and faculty alike have always been very kind to me over the years,” said Trimbath, who currently teaches courses in painting, drawing, and art history.
Trimbath’s sole piece in the faculty exhibit is Good Will, an oil painting that took him about a year and a half to complete, over countless weekends and other windows of free time.
The artwork depicts an eclectic collection of “mundane objects,” some of which Trimbath has bought from thrift stores over the years, he explained.
“I’m fascinated with older objects and materials that seem to have outlived their aesthetic or use value,” Trimbath said. “The people that once owned or used them have moved on and no longer value them as they once did. The way I see it, this deficiency, of a sort, provides the inherent potential an object now has for me to transform it.
“I sometimes think of the objects I find as orphans, but when I put them together in the right way, a new kind of family is created,” Trimbath continued.
While both Trimbath and Allebe specialize in paintings and drawings, the faculty exhibit showcases several other forms of media—including sculptures, ceramics, and digital multimedia art—from their peers at the college as well. The diverse show was curated by Laura-Susan Thomas, director of the Ann Foxworthy Gallery.
“I love the challenge of bringing together artworks that encompass many different mediums, messaging, and stylistic approaches,” Thomas said. “My goal as a gallery director is to view the work as a whole and find a way to install the work on the walls so each artwork ‘speaks’ to the others.”
Speak to Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 17-24, 2022.
