In any other gallery, Lizabeth Madal's genially painted
scenes in her show "Harbor Town" would have been a pleasant enough view
of days in the life of the microcosmic "town" that is Santa Barbara's
harbor. But the canvases takes on extra relevance and substance in their
current home, upstairs in the harbor-based Maritime Museum's newly
dedicated art exhibition area.
As we gander at the small show, we're struck by the reality
just outside the museum's doors being channeled into paint on canvas.
With these friendly images of the world, literally, directly outside the
gallery, Madal maintains a mostly soft-edged realist approach in her
work, but veers into some alternate expressive directions on occasion.
"Sunset Sails" is the largest painting of the group, with a
dramatically reddened twilight aura hovering over the sailboat-flecked
ocean scenery, while "Mist & Moon" is the closest thing in the show
to a neo-impressionist vision. In this painting, delineations between
sea and sky are melted around the edges, in a misty-eyed integration of
visual sensation.
More down the middle, expressively speaking, are paintings
such as "Kayaks for Rent" and "The Fisherman," more picturesque - and
picaresque - illustrative images of our own special harbor life.
Underlying Madal's handfuls of pleasing paintings here, the show manages
to convey the idea that ours is a postcard-scenic harbor, but also a
working junction with the sea, catering to the fishing trade as much as
the tourist trade.
Adjacent to Madal's painting show is "Postcards from
Paradise," a fascinating exhibition showing enlargements of select
postcard images from Peter Jordano's extensive collection. The focus of
the vintage views seen here, fittingly, is on the Santa Barbara
waterfront, making for a ripe "back when" perspective, in counterpoint
but also in collusion with Madal's modern-day harbor musings.
Much of the historical vantage in this selection of images is
on the turn of the 20th century and Cabrillo Blvd. life pre-1926
earthquake. That quake infamously ravaged the existing Santa Barbara
cityscape and made for a forcibly neat distinguishing point between
epochs in town.
What we see from the Jordano collection are impressive and
imposing waterfront structures now swept into the tide of history,
including the large Potter Hotel, the now-destroyed Castle Rock and the
original, larger and covered Los Bañosbath house, circa 1901. Somewhat
poignantly in retrospect, we take in these visions of old with a
slightly detached admiration, given the radical changes where Cabrillo
meets the Pacific, post-quake.
But if these views of old school Cabrillo Boulevard, with its
Plaza del Mar promenade, can be both exotic and a bit alienating, one
reassuring structural sign of life seen in hand-tinted photographic
postcard form in this exhibition is the Cabrillo Pavilion. That
impressive building still stands in all its antiqued - if post-quake -
glory on East Beach, available to all 21st-century beachgoers and
leisuretime revelers.
ART REVIEW
LIZABETH MADAL, 'HARBOR TOWN'
When: through May, 2011
Where: Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, 113 Harbor Way
Gallery hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
every day except Wednesday
Information:
962-8404,
sbmm.org
