| |
| |
Jun. 30, 2006 |
Painting
a Foggy Picture (click here to
read review)
Mood- and light-sensitive landscape painter Schiffer presents
an exhibition at the Easton Gallery
Santa Barbara News-Press By Josef Woodard |
| Nov. 12, 2004 |
Subtle
Place Settings (click here to
read review)
Pamela Kendall Schiffer demonstrates the power of subtlety
and taking landscape-art roads less taken. Santa Barbara
News-Press, By Josef Woodard |
| Oct. 31, 2002 |
Natural
Tendencies (click here to read
review)
Pamela Kendall Schiffer and Patricia Hedrick. At the Easton
Gallery, through December 1.
Santa Barbara Independent, By Josef Woodard |
| Jan. 3, 2002 |
Mists
and Chickens
The Independent by D.J. Palladino |
| Feb. 22, 2001 |
From
Nature's Palette
Santa Barbara News-Press by Joan Crowder |
| Jan. 6, 1995 |
Winners
Dazzle and Beguile
Santa Barbara News-Press by Michael Darling |
| Dec. 15, 1994 |
Minor
Key The Independent by Judith Callender |
Painting a Foggy Picture
Mood-and light-sensitive landscape painter Schiffer presents
an exhibition at the Easton Gallery
Santa Barbara News-Press June 30, 2006 - By Josef Woodard
In Pamela Kendall Schiffer’s ascetically understated
and small-scaled paintings, the subtlety of the art requires
the viewer to look with an unusually calm, close-up scrutiny.
Ideally, one should hush the chatter and noise of everyday
thoughts to get in the right mental zone to appreciate
this art, although the art itself will aid in that process.
This is not to say that Schiffer calls on overtly meditative
tactics in her work, other than the inherent contemplation
involved in creating a painting well-painted, a visual
scenario well-conveyed. There are plenty of these small
victories in her latest exhibition at the Easton Gallery,
under the show title “Defined by Light.” These
paintings are, in fact, defined by light, and often by
the lack thereof. As with her last show in this space,
Schiffer digs into her favored format of mostly small,
muted and moody paintings in no hurry to dazzle with scenery
or extroverted effects. Hers is a landscape style refreshingly
varied from the norm, as much about the feeling in the
air of a foggy day or in the half light of dawn or dusk.
She also tends to favor spare nature settings, as well,
free of the usual grandeur of details.
The main points of interest in “Still Morning in
June” are a curving stretch of railroad tracks and
a eucalyptus tree. “Morning Glow, Devereux”
is one of several paintings depicting this notably magical
stretch of land and beach, just north of Isla Vista, but
with an emphasis on the haze of atmosphere more than fine
points. The brightest, bluest sky in this show of paintings
is in “Winged Clouds over the Pasture,” which
almost appears like a conventional landscape painting,
except for the minimalism of its scenery.
We do get a darkly witty bit of detail in the painting
“Striped Winter Sky”—in the form of
pernicious oil platforms marring the ocean’s horizon
line. Birds appear, but are only faintly visible, in the
nocturnal scene “Night Gulls at Anacapa.”
Again, we strain to make sense of the painting, but it’s
a happy and rewarding strain.
One of the most surreal paintings of the lot is also the
largest and potentially the most pragmatically pictorial.
In “Early Morning at Carpinteria Beach,” the
scene of beach-fishing from the sand is neatly presented
in the composition. All seems to be in order, except that
the faded, vaporous density of the image makes it seem
like something out of a dream, not quite made of matter. |
Subtle Place Settings
Pamela Kendall Schiffer demonstrates the power of subtlety
and taking landscape-art roads less taken.
Santa Barbara News-Press, November 12, 2004 - By Josef
Woodard
Anyone wondering why landscape art, plein air and otherwise,
is such a potent and recurrent subject in Santa Barbara
galleries needs only do some simple math to find the answer.
A region with dazzling natural splendors tends to inspire
dazzling nature-oriented art, not to mention exerting
a strong lure for artists so inclined.
Given the local landscape predisposition in galleries,
though, the challenge for artists becomes to find a unique
place in a busy and talented pack. Some of the finer area
artists in the “landscape business” find their
way into the Easton Gallery in Montecito. Pamela Kendall
Schiffer, currently presenting her debut solo show, takes
notable steps to the left of the tradition, in an exhibition
both conspicuously diverse and coherent, in terms of medium
and perspective.
In her aptly titled show, “The Power of Place,”
Schiffer has some refreshing new ideas and approaches
in her landscapes, beachscapes and what could be called
“atmospherescapes.” The latter notion is invested
in small, evocatively textural paintings like “Fog”
and “Horizon.” The point in “Horizon,”
for instance, is not the bottom-hugging grounding horizon
line, but the delicate color gradations of a twilight
sky.
In other highlights of the show, she veers in an opposite
direction, locking her focus in on bold, disarming details
of plant life. “Agave Stalk, Blue Sky” describes
its subject in the title, but the real charm of the painting
lies in the crisp observational powers at work, as well
as the cryptic effect of odd framing—what is left
out is as mind-catching as what we see.
“Yuccas by Moonlight,” another strange and
wonderful piece described with a deceptive clarity in
the title, is a severely light-limited, nocturnal view.
Intense scrutiny is required to make out details, but
the painting relies on the inherent effects of nature
under night’s blanket to convey a natural sense
of mystery—and place.
Other smaller paintings in the show take different routes
to expression, whether the soft and dark palette of “Gaviota
Hills” or the delicate air of “Agave Stalk,
Brown,” almost suggesting an antique, sepia-toned
photograph.
Schiffer’s paintings of Bixby Ranch almost go out
of their way to avoid over-dramatizing pictorialism. Its
planes and fields are viewed as if through a dream lens,
murkily.
When she looks at surf, she pares down instead of zooming
out, resulting in the tight focus of “A Single Wave,”
singularly impressive in its understatement. Her paintings
of birds in the glistening wave-splashed sand are studies
in visual rhythm and echoes.
Deceptively cool and spare, Schiffer’s art often
gears itself toward muted tones and hazy layers. Sometimes,
her work can seem austere in its tautly-trained attentions,
more obsessed with a single agave stalk or a single wave
than the sweep of contoured land. It all comes together
in an aesthetic guided by an abiding taste for subtlety
and mystery. She’s on to something nature-reverent,
and on admirably personal terms. |
Natural Tendencies
Pamela Kendall Schiffer and Patricia Hedrick. At the Easton
Gallery, through December 1.
Santa Barbara Independent, October 31, 2002 - By Josef
Woodard
Nature comes to visit, as is her wont, in the current
two-person show at the Easton Gallery. And, as is usually
the case, the art on the Easton walls deals with landscape
in sensitive, personalized ways. Pamela Kendall Schiffer
and Patricia Hedrick make for complementary exhibition-mates
because of their proximities and distinctions, and the
fact that both are clearly tied to the natural cause.
Drama plays out in subtle ways, in many works here. The
heroic protagonist in Schiffer’s “Agave”
is a lone agave plant in sunlight, with tilting eucalyptus
trees in the background. She goes horizontal with the
wide view in “Fenceline at Hollister,” creating
a tapestry of rolling green, yawning blue, and an arcing
line of fence woven into a harmonious painting.
Mood-encoded light is the order of business in “Shade
of Winter Day,” a nice, sparse landscape celebrating
its shade-flecked scenery. With Schiffer’s “Clouds,”
a small, almost abstract piece, nebulousness is the operative
word here....
For local color—and, by extension, local preservationist
power—Schiffer gives us the aptly and accurately
titled “Flaxen Light, San Marcos Hills” and
“Dense Fog at Parma Park.” These are two inspiring
and lesser-trafficked stretches of unspoiled land in Santa
Barbara, sites ripe for open-eyed artists and other living
things.
The impressive work by both artists reminds us that, in
the right hands and with the right investigative mind-set,
landscape is a world of endless expressive possibility. |
| |
|
|
 |
|
