Game of Thrones is allegedly over, but winter is still coming. And for Solvang Antiques Fine Art Gallery, the season arrived earlier than its designated start date (Dec. 21). The gallery’s annual Holiday Art Show opened on Nov. 29 and exhibits a diverse collection of pieces from eight local artists.
One featured oil painting, titled Joy of Winter, depicts a snowy landscape foreign to any climate you’re likely to find on the Central Coast no matter what time of year. Artist Sheryl Knight created the scene while visiting Tenmile Creek, near Hume Lake in the Sequoia National Forest.
“Many of the pieces in the show were inspired by painting trips to the Sierras,” said Knight, whose other featured paintings in the show include Sierra Lake at Sunset and Sierra Sunrise.
Knight uses large brushes and palette knives to paint her oil landscapes, which she completes either outdoors on location (en plein air) or in her studio. Some of her biggest influences include Richard Schmid and Scott Christensen.
“I tend to have a lot of texture and color in my paintings,” Knight said. “And consider myself an impressionistic painter.”
While the Holiday Art Show features many timely pieces, such as the aforementioned Joy of Winter as well as Knight’s December Light, a beautifully brisk landscape created in Lassen National Forest, non-seasonal works are on display in the exhibition as well. Knight’s Cypress at Sunset and After the Rain, for example, depict weather-neutral landscapes without an ounce of snow in sight. Both pieces were painted during one of Knight’s trips to the Point Lobos State Reserve, near Carmel.
Knight’s paintings join the works of Joe Barbieri, Howard Carr, Bill Churchill, Dirk Foslien, Joe Mancuso, Barron Postmus, and Mary Kay West; the other seven artists featured in the Holiday Art Show, which runs at the gallery through Dec. 31.
“I am familiar with many of the other artists in the gallery and their work,” Knight said. “[All] very talented and do beautiful work.”
Like Knight, fellow featured artist West uses oils to create her pieces, which are mostly still life and wildlife paintings.
“Birds have become my specialty,” West told the Sun. “They are, of course, beautiful. Even the most commonplace species evoke a sense of possibility symbolized by the magic of flight and of liberation from the prisons we create for ourselves.”
As an occasional respite from bird paintings, West creates landscapes as well. One of the Holiday Art Show’s featured paintings is View of Orcutt Hills, which West was inspired to capture after the trail became a frequent dog-walking destination.
“I love the light there in the afternoon, along the trails where I walk my dog,” West said. “It’s an early fall scene with the grass just turning gold and the trees still bright green.”
Influenced by Johannes Vermeer, Ray Harris Ching, and other artists, West has found that no matter what subject she’s tackling, her primary focus is consistent throughout her body of work, she explained.
“The inspiration behind all my work is the same, regardless of the subject, and that is the beauty of the world and of nature; knowing that my experience of that beauty depends on my own inner state of consciousness,” West said. “So when I paint, I’m going back and forth between what I perceive, how I feel, and how that is recreated on the panel.”
Similar to a visitor’s experience viewing the exhibit, West had not seen any of the other featured artists’ works before the show’s opening.
“But I am very familiar with the other artists’ work,” she said. “I’m happy to be in the presence of such talented artists and, of course, think very highly of their work.”
Staying blind to other featured pieces in the show while submitting her own works wasn’t an unusual choice for West, as the outcome of her own creations would have remained the same either way, the artist explained.
“It doesn’t matter to me what another artist is doing. I seek what is within my own mind and heart, to successfully put it on panel and offer it up,” she said.
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood supports art with heart. Reach him at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 5-12, 2019.