Ojai – OH CALIFORNIA!

Submitted by Ojai Valley Scribe on
landscape including oak trees and poppies

Joan Dewhirst will visit the Ojai Library at 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 18, 2019, to deliver a talk entitled “OH CALIFORNIA! 19th and 20th Century California Landscape Paintings.” Ms. Dewhirst comes to us via the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Community Speakers Program.

Since its earliest history, California has been named the “land of promise” due to its diverse and rich beauty and natural resources. This presentation will cover the dramatic changes in the artistic representation of California’s rich landscape paintings. Dewhirst starts with Albert Bierstadt’s Luminist paintings, where he used light to emphasize the spiritual beauty in California’s natural environments, and moves forward to the Tonalist compositions of Arthur Mathews that conveyed a quiet mood and atmospheric effects.

Next the influence of French Impressionism is explored, where a new version of a “California style” Impressionism flourished in the warm and sunny climes of Southern California. The presentation concludes in the early- to mid-1900s, exploring the tendency toward individual expression and Modernism. Some of these modern artists worked in pure color, using dramatic light-dark contrasts and powerful form. New Modernist ideas focusing on Abstraction finally attained pre-eminence over Representational art after World War II.

This event is free and open to the public. For additional information, contact Ron Solórzano, Regional Librarian, at (805) 218-9146.

The Ojai Library is located at 111 East Ojai Avenue in Ojai, CA. Hours of service are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

Audience