Last year marked artist Ginny Speirs’ first year of membership with Gallery Los Olivos, where she recently joined two of her peers to co-organize the venue’s latest group exhibition.
“I embraced the opportunity to get to know my fellow artists better,” said Speirs, who jumped at the chance to help hang the featured artworks in Gallery Los Olivos’ annual Winter Salon, which premiered in early December and is scheduled to remain on display through the end of January.
This year’s iteration of the exhibit was managed by Speirs and local artists Linda Mutti and Renée Kelleher. All three artists also have their own artworks featured in the showcase, which includes a collection of abstracts, still lifes, landscapes, and intimate portraits. Alongside the show’s several paintings, there are also photographs, ceramics, and assemblage pieces on display.
“We made a great team as we agreed on hanging based on color and themes,” Speirs said. “In the beginning, we were a bit overwhelmed by the amount of artwork and larger sizes we were to install. … Hanging a salon-style show can be challenging, as it is important to give each work the proper attention and enough space to be viewed.”
The trio’s color-based arrangements begin near the front doors of the gallery, where they decided to start with a collection of artworks that all share a pink tint.
“This panel has a common theme of the color pink, as we chose a photograph of a pink car, a painting of a floral landscape, and a portrait of a young girl adorned in pink,” said Speirs, a Santa Barbara-based artist who mainly paints floral still life pieces.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Speirs’ passion for art began with self-portraits she would complete in crayon at age 7. She’s lived in Santa Barbara with her husband, Garrett, also an artist, for about two decades.
Speirs’ two paintings in Winter Salon are Nightbloomer, which depicts a blooming cactus flower against a dark background, and Profile, a closeup still of a sunflower.
“I feel like a common theme in the works from this show is the natural beauty that we are surrounded by in this region of California,” Speirs said. “All in all, we felt we had accomplished a balanced-looking show.”
Most of the landscapes featured in Winter Salon capture locales along the Central Coast, said Mutti, a local pastelist and oil painter with memberships to the Pastel Society of the West Coast, the Pastel Society of America, the OAK Group, Santa Barbara Art Association, and Southern California Artists Painting for the Environment (SCAPE).
“We had a lot of fun hanging the show,” Mutti said. “There was so much diversity in the work.”
Mutti has two of her own landscapes included in the showcase: a pastel piece titled Dawn’s Early Light and an oil painting called Coastal Sunset.
One factor Mutti has noticed spanning the various pieces is that each artists’ enthusiasm for their respective medium and subject matter seems to be apparent through their works.
“The common thread I see,” Mutti said, “is the artists’ passion for what they do.”
Start a thread with Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2022.