A Den Mother to the Artists of ‘Wild California’

To anyone who has ever stood still and looked, really looked, at some lovely and noteworthy scene--a bluff, a beach, a copse of trees, a frill of foothills--and then seen a painting done from the same vantage point, there is first the shock of recognition, and then the shock of not recognizing the spot at all.

The left brain, the logical brain, acknowledges the scale, dimensions, topography of the place . . . but then it says, “Wait a minute. I didn’t see any purple in that forest!” But then the right brain, the artistic brain, kicks in and says, “All right, maybe I didn’t see the purple, but it sure looks like it belongs there.”

Why bother with landscape painting, especially now, when you can take a photograph, tape a video, buy a postcard that renders every detail to big-Crayola-box accuracy?

Because there is still a difference between looking and seeing. Most of us merely look; artists see. The average eye takes in a scene and moves on; the artistic eye stops and considers and brings into focus detail and space and intensity that the average eye bypasses. It sees that the purple in a grove of eucalyptus evokes the sweetness and coolness of shadow better than a palette of a dozen greens, that a thin pink-violet horizon in a blue sky creates a perspective that simple azure cannot.

Looking at a landscape painting can be like putting on a pair of glasses that correct the vision not for precision, but for intangibles, for the ineffable truth of light and place. And the place and light that Ellen Easton’s artists have chosen are in a patch of California called Santa Barbara.

ellen easton is a fifth-generation californian who has spent most of her life in a pastoral California that few of her 35 million state fellows have seen except fleetingly, from a freeway or an airplane.

It was in her great-great-grandfather’s law office in San Francisco that the first bylaws of the Sierra Club were drawn up. One grandfather was Max Brand, the Western writer. The other owned or co-owned several historic ranches, including Zaca Laderas, the one that Easton spent so much time on, the one that pop star Michael Jackson now owns. Her father, too, is an ardent environmentalist, chronicler of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that made so many Californians get green religion.

She missed all that in the dozen years she spent as wife to a Stanford professor, living in Palo Alto; missed Santa Barbara’s placid, sedate seasons and changeless vistas, all the more as such places were disappearing under the bulldozer’s blade and the subdivider’s blueprints.

Now no one, not even Bill Gates, and certainly not 10,000 Ellen Eastons, has the money to preserve California as it was. But a painting could hold it fast. As a schoolgirl, Easton used to trade copies of her father’s book for paintings by a friend’s father.

And so a woman who had taken only one art history course, who hadn’t picked up a brush herself except the kind one dips in house paint, set up a gallery nine years ago in her home--living room, dining room, den, kitchen, study, rooms devoted exclusively to the work of her baker’s dozen of landscape artists.

With her four children grown and gone, she is the second leg of a three-legged stool: her artists are the first leg, and her regular clients are the third. They have told her that when they are away, the paintings, even the catalogs of her shows, are “a lifeline” to California. One man was so mesmerized by a painting he bought that he sent Easton a short story he wrote about it.

Already she has collected paintings of historic area ranchos into one book, and a second, on the gardens of Santa Barbara, could be out next year. “I think my love of what I’m doing is not just for painting history, but a practical love of this landscape.”

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“Do you ever pick up ‘Art in America’?” she asks. This is not an inquiry about my reading habits, but about the state of art in the nation. “It’s assembly art. I can’t understand it. But people respond to this” --to the landscapes hanging on the whitewashed brick walls. “It’s not the ‘in thing,’ but they are truly moved by it.”

She too must be moved by it, which is why, to her coterie of artists, she is more Cub Scout den mother than gallery owner. She organizes painting expeditions to spots like Santa Cruz Island, to off-limits private ranches, then goes off on a day hike. And when she returns, “it seems almost magical to me. They’ve set up blank canvases, blank paper, and I come back and they’ve created something amazing.”

One of her artists found himself so caught up in the beauty of the Carpinteria bluffs that he campaigned to save them. Often she gives 10% of the proceeds of one show or another to saving some patch of wild California.

“The paintings certainly raise an awareness of the beauty around us, and how threatened most of it is. Just in the 10 years we’ve been working, things have really changed. It’s sobering, but at least we have a record of it.”

And for one moment, the flawless light beyond the window illuminates the still-unmarred diagonals of mountains, and reveals the merest touch of fig-purple in the tree line. Almost like the paintings on the wall.

The Easton Gallery, (805) 969-5781.