Off-road artists Ellen Yeomans and Morgan Green celebrate their penchant for taking a cart full of canvas and paint deep into the wild spaces of the Central Coast in Los Olivos Gallery’s latest exhibit, Two for the Road.
“That’s why Ellen and I like to show together, we have a similar approach to art,” Green said, adding that her fellow painter enjoys painting in solitude. “I also like to go out by myself, and you know, that’s not that common, especially among women artists.”
She said most plein air painters hit the open spaces in groups, setting up easels next to one another. But for Green, the wilder the country, the more comfortable she is. To transport her art supplies into that unpaved terrain, she uses an old barnyard cart made expressly for hauling manure out of barn stalls. Yeomans fashioned her cart from available materials—including a stroller wheel and a couple of wheelbarrow handles—saying it’s pretty crude, but gets the job done.
“It’s really a neat thing,” Yeomans said. “So I can walk as far as I want and not really feel oppressed by the weight.”
Yeomans also takes solace in being away from people and in her element—open, non-urban space. Oil is her medium, and she attempts to complete her works while she’s out, en plein air. If she doesn’t complete a painting on the spot, she sets the easel up in her yard and finishes it there.
The green, beige, blue, and brown hues of Santa Barbara County’s landscape fill her paintings, and she said the cart she built really removed the limitation of only being able to walk to a place it was convenient to carry supplies to. At the moment, one of her favorite spots to hit the trail, materials in tow, is the San Antonio Creek Trail, at the bottom of San Marcos Pass.
“There’s some really nice views of the canyons, the hills, that you really don’t see from the road,” she said, adding that she also likes to visit a spot across the street from the Santa Barbara mission. “It’s a really good feeling place to me. … It’s part of the mission, and it’s part of the history.”
That plot of land holds the remains of the industries that once helped sustain the mission: the tannery, jail, and an old gristmill with the reservoir that once fed it. Yeomans’ painting of the mission’s old grist mill, Holding the Space, is a little out of character from what she usually paints, but she said there’s just something about it that captivated her.
Whereas Yeoman likes to finish her paintings onsite, Green said she prefers to finish her pastel paintings at home. As she enjoys the drama and emotional pull of sunrise and sunset, the light changes quickly, and she said artists often have to turn their back on the scene they’re painting to finish. She would rather put the pastels away and finish her art later. But she, too, is compelled to paint outdoors once she gets back to the house.
“I have a studio, and I end up on the patio under an umbrella to finish my work,” she said.
Green’s work isn’t quite as bright and textured as Yeomans’, and the contrast between them really shows in the front room at the Los Olivos Gallery. Green said she doesn’t like to sweat the details in her paintings, leaving room for viewers to interpret it as they will.
One of her favorite paintings in the show is from an evening spent on a fishing dock, floating in the water of Lake Cachuma as the sun set, lighting up the hills across the water with that sweet-colored glow.
“It was just a perfect place to be,” she said. “Right now, that spot is doubtless dry, which is really sad.”
A third artist joined the exhibiting pair on April 1, gourd sculptor Mary Velasquez. Velasquez grows the gourds that serve as the foundation for her sculptures, carving, coloring, and adorning them with found items. The show runs through April 30. m
Managing Editor Camillia Lanham pines away for wild solitude when she’s stuck looking out her office window. Contact her at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 2-9, 2015.