When a painting in progress begins hinting at objects, structures, and lifeforms found in the real world, abstract artist Marlene Struss goes back to square one.
“If I start looking at it and think, ‘Oh, this looks like a tree,’ that really blows it,” the Santa Barbara-based painter said. “I’ll start putting limits on myself and applying rules that have to do with a tree. But what I’m trying to do is something without limits.”
While avoiding literal depictions of plants and animals, Struss nearly always centers her acrylic abstracts on themes of nature.
Many of her works address the ominous impacts of global warming, with nightmarish titles like Return to Dust and I’m Melting. Those pieces are two of six paintings by Struss in a new group exhibition, Tipping Point, at Santa Maria’s Ann Foxworthy Gallery, conceptualized and curated by artist Cynthia Martin, whose own work is featured in the show as well.
Each of the artworks by Struss, Martin, and four additional artists in the exhibit translates issues of climate change into various forms of visual media.
“I’m sure the reason she [Martin] picked me was that it seems like most of my work has to do with nature, and a lot of the titles have to do with global warming. I’ve been really worried about it for such a long time,” Struss said. “When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a paper on air pollution because it was already a big thing back then. I have just been more appalled every year of my life since then that nothing seems to be happening about it.
“We’re not really taking the steps we need to take,” Struss added. “Politicians aren’t taking it seriously. I just don’t understand why we’re not frantically designing some kind of protection from that.”
One reason Struss chooses not to depict human figures in her paintings is “because I’m just so disappointed in mankind in general,” the artist explained.
“I mean, I like people a lot, but mankind as a species has really messed things up,” Struss said. “It seems like most art nowadays is figurative, and I just can’t see myself joining the crowd and honoring the human species. Nature is much more glorious, in my eyes anyway. I just choose to honor nature.”
Before premiering at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery in September, Tipping Point was originally showcased as a group show at The Arts Fund in Santa Barbara during the spring of 2022. Struss’ and Martin’s pieces in both iterations of the exhibit were hung alongside artworks by fellow featured artists Susan Tibbles, R.T. Livingston, Tom Pazderka, and Bay Hallowell.
Martin handpicked the show’s featured artists and “nurtured the exhibition’s evolution with great care and perspicacity,” said Hallowell, whose semi-abstract landscape prints, May Gray Morning Bird Song and Above and Below, are on display in Tipping Point. Both pieces were inspired by Halloway’s “solitary walks in nature,” the Santa Barbara-based artist said.
“One can experience an inordinate amount of exquisite nature in Santa Barbara and its environs, and I find myself mourning the beauty here as much as celebrating it because nature is in trouble,” Hallowell said. “The cycles of life that we have relied upon and found reassuring since childhood are being disrupted. I feel anger about the situation we have created.”
Hallowell created her meditative stencil pieces in Tipping Point to express the feeling of “a wistful longing, akin to homesickness, for the beauty and bounty we have taken for granted for so long.”
“My hope is that a sense of clear-eyed wonder coupled with regret and a determination to do better comes through in these prints,” Hallowell said.
Send birdsongs to Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 6-13, 2022.
