When Alana Clumeck was pregnant with her first child, she wasn’t expecting the pregnancy to indirectly lead her to a thriving career as an artist.
Clumeck, who lives in Santa Ynez, is featured in a new show at Wendy Foster in Los Olivos. Her work features her take on the wildlife and fauna of the region, influenced largely by her love of the American West and her own deeply personal experiences.
Art has always shaped Clumeck’s life in one way or another, especially in her early years. The Australian-born artist grew up in Margaret River, deep in wine country not unlike where she resides now.
“The Central Coast reminds me a lot of home,” she said. “So it’s a little bit nostalgic for me living here.”
Her parents were potters and ran a studio that was attached to their home. She said she was always surrounded by creative people and was involved her parents’ artistic endeavors.
But Clumeck never took to art herself, at least not at first.
“I was always in awe of what [my parents] did,” she said. “But I just didn’t think I had the ability.”
Even with her hesitancy to become an artist, an allure still lingered in her life. Clumeck said she would find herself spending hours at museums such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia, staring at paintings and feeling awestruck by the work.
But it wasn’t until years later when she would embrace art fully, almost out of necessity. When she became pregnant, she experienced severe antenatal depression. She had difficulty expressing what it was like to feel the joy of having a child coupled with bleak anxiety and bouts of depression. So Clumeck sought out art as a way to cope.
“I just had this urgency that I needed to be creative,” she said. “That was my outlet. That’s how I started painting. I just bought some art supplies.”
She said that ever since then, painting has been therapeutic for her. Clumeck said painting clears her mind and allows her to focus.
“I don’t think about things,” she said. “I could lose myself for hours when I’m painting. I think that was how it became therapeutic for me.”
Clumeck has managed to cultivate a thriving career as a painter in the Santa Ynez Valley since she began painting. She utilizes a lush palette of bright pastels and muted colors to portray the sweeping vastness and sheer beauty of the landscape and creatures that call it home.
For her current exhibition, titled Wallflower, Clumeck focused on the summer in Santa Ynez Valley, studying the contrasts between the lush greenery and flowers of the valley and animals like horses, which she said she feels a strong connection to.
“They’re kind of wild inside,” she said. “They are conforming to what they are trained to be, and I found that connection; we’re wild but then we’re in these mom or wife shoes.”
Her work strips away much of the severity associated with traditional Western art in favor of gentler, freer strokes, conveying a breathy sense of autonomy in the horizon. Clumeck’s Western landscape is not one of darkly troubled men affixed to steeds, sternly gazing off into all-consuming sunsets, lamenting a long gone way of life. Clumeck’s is born out of a hazy dream—effortless and filled with wild possibility.
Clumeck said she wanted the work to feel unique, to elicit an emotion beyond an aesthetic reaction.
“Wallflower is a play on words,” she explained. “In old Australian slang, a wallflower is a bit of an introvert but of striking resemblance, and full personality if you dig deep enough to get to know them.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose has never been much of a wallflower. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2017.
