The women featured in Women at Work: Three Artistic Visions each brings a lifetime of creativity to the exhibit showing at Gallery Los Olivos in July.
Julie Fish spent most of her life living all over the world. Her father worked for the U.S. State Department and his work brought the family to places like Taipei, Brazil, India, and Panama.
“My mother was really good at giving us all kinds of opportunities to be exposed to art,” Fish said. “But I never thought of myself as an artist.”
Fish married and the couple joined the Peace Corps, spending more time working around the world. In Honduras, she met renowned artist Benigno Gomez, who was sponsored by the Honduran government.
“I speak Spanish so I told him I loved a painting of his,” Fish said. “I went up to him and asked him how to paint. Everything changed after that.”
The unique request inspired a friendship between the two, and prompted Fish to pursue art with a renewed confidence. Gomez taught her some techniques and gifted her with an understanding of how to create using colors and lines on canvas.
Today, the retired teacher has settled down, spending the past 30 years of her life in the Santa Maria Valley. When she retired, she promised she would commit herself to art full time.
“[My art] makes you smile,” she said. “It’s kind of like a beginner. It’s simplistic. But it’s also wildly imaginative. I just always kind of went with it. It’s really me letting go of all my ego and frailties. I learned to just enjoy what comes out.”
Patti Robbins was born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, New York. She did art her entire life, but like so many young artists, her family didn’t encourage it because of the near-impossibility of commercial success.
“My mother never encouraged it because she said artists don’t make money,” Robbins said. “So it was always a hobby.”
Robbins graduated from American University and attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. She and her husband settled in Atlanta and while he launched a dental practice, she attended Atlanta College of Art.
Now, retired and settled in Central California, Robbins mostly focuses on still life or figurative work, opting to paint people she actually knows and understands. She also collects objects or borrows them from friends, playing with her still life sets until she finds something that captivates her.
“I don’t do people I don’t know,” she said. “I cannot put their soul or who they are into the painting. Right now I also don’t do landscapes anymore. Yes, it’s beautiful here, but I just don’t do them anymore. Now I just like to do still life.”
Morro Bay artist Jayne Behman rounds out the collection of artists showing in Women at Work. Behman studied Fine Arts and Abstract and Realism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and works in a variety of media and formats including paint, glass, and sculpture.
“My work is very non-objective, which means that you won’t see anything recognizable,” she said. “The viewer has to internalize their own feelings about color, form, and movement.”
Behman said with the closure of many local galleries, it’s important to have shows that focus on local artists and their unique visions, especially one that highlights how three different female artists interpret a connected visual space.
“It’s important to see how each of these women work and how they relate to their environment,” Behman said. “A show of women’s artists is exciting. Paintings are just fragments of a bigger picture. If it’s a landscape it’s just a fragment of the whole environment. So it’s very exciting to see glimpses into each artist’s fragment.”
Arts and Lifestyle writer Rebecca Rose would love to visit Brooklyn sometime. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.