The one textile art piece in the gallery, Diedrick Brackens’s “Stealing dark from the sky” (from intricately woven cotton and acrylic yarn) hints at a native mythological narrative tucked into an image of silhouetted figures and a pastel pattern backdrop. Is it real or a jumbo tourist-bait replica? The startled look on a vacationing family’s face leaves us wondering. Subtle subversion also sneaks into the scenery in Jonas Wood’s “Four Landscapes,” a quartet of paintings conveying the four seasons, but with the summer episode rendered tense by the presence of a large Tyrannosaurus. Art-wise, Ryan’s deceptively tidy but logic-defying composition suggests a marriage between surrealist Rene Magritte and design confounder M.C. In Jonathan Ryan’s “Mist”, an aerial perspective looking down on a garden maze, variously refers to the impulse to neatly contain nature into such diversions as human-scaled mazes made from carefully manicured vegetation. Painting’s rich history and tangle of associations can’t help but leave imprints on the medium, even when contemporary artists seek to upend or redirect past influences. “Stealing dark from the sky” by Diedrick Brackens | Credit: Courtesy But despite its massive scale, the three-panel painting is less brashly monumental than it is meditative, with landscape and garden references layered and softened by a post-post-impressionist quality reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s palette and eye. Whitney Bedford, also currently showing her work in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Inside/Outside show in the contemporary gallery, supplies the Atkinson show’s epic centerpiece, “Veduta (Bonnard Mediterranean Morning) Triptych,” consuming one gallery wall. Most of the pieces also come equipped with agendas reframing old norms and assumptions about what landscape art is and can be. More precisely, the show offers six alternative contemporary landscape variations - the number of artists and artworks in this initial run in the two-part series.Ĭurated by the gallery director John Connelly, the selection highlights the diversity of personal artistic approaches to the time-honored culture of art celebrating landscape, seascape, and urban settings. In a city rife with artists working in the vein of traditional landscape painting, and often with considerable skill and sensitivity, the exhibition New Landscapes Part I, at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery, stands apart and offers alternative visions.

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