The Ojai Post

Hank Pitcher at Sullivan Goss

Montecito Beaches

Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery
Montecito Beaches by Hank Pitcher • Through Aug 31 •
7 East Anapamu St. Santa Barbara• Daily 10-5:30pm •805-730-1460.

By Steve Sprinkel 6 August 2008
Ojai, California

Thirty years ago it was surprising to hear Hank Pitcher claim that he was going to be a great painter. He was serious as a bull sea lion about it too. When he talked about Claude Monet it was like they were best friends. We were in our early twenties at the time and the notion of revealing such a hope-not a boast- never would have occurred to me. I never have doubted his vow. All these years I’ve had little reason to.

The revelation was audacious, and a dare. I did not say that I never thought that way-but the proof now is that Mr. Pitcher is making good on his promise to fate and his angels and though I may have regrets that I did not sweep every distraction away to better pursue my own art, I know now that a single-mindedness, a toughness, an early maturity, graced Hank back when we used to surf around Goleta and Santa Barbara and make small plein air paintings of a landscape that this artist now has classically memorialized. There were times when the surf was too good for anyone except Hank to pass on. Hank, I surmised, preferred something more personally profound than another go-out at Sands. I thought I had time, so I just kept paddling out.

I learned quite a lot from Hank during the times we spent together, about looking, about reverence for place, about irony and the charcoal blue of mountain ranges in the distance. Discretion was something else I might have learned better.

I’ve seen Hank Pitcher’s studio over the years, observing huge inventories of uniformly quality work slowly build, then slowly recede. He knew it would happen that way. The lighthouse paintings he made with Michael Drury at Conception in the 1980s-gone. Strong, prescient, nearly full-scale figuration work from the seventies when the landscape frequently was mere stage-gone. The Maguey Series-gone. Many of the family of big paintings made in Montecito featured in his current show, including the heroic iconography and skies at Coral Casino and the too-tidy bungalos of Mira Mar, are on someone else’s wall now.

In the 1970s, after time had passed and the paintings in one of Hank’s shows had failed to sell much, a gang of us commiserated with him with a few beers out on foggy Devereaux Point at UCSB where he has worked for many years. A few of us treated the show as if it was some disaster, but Hank ignored the pessimism. “ Oh someday they will all be gone.” Doubt was not an option. Hank knew how things would all play out-the past just beginning to be prologue to his future-but I was then, as now, impressed at his resolve-for surely all who work in the arts must be determined or we pretend.

Its good to be hungry. Over time, Hank Pitcher’s style has found an individual groove carved by work, more work, and a discipline that was not too grave to ignore narrative, nor the soulful sport of bagging light with a brush that he honed as a youth. This work could not be about realism, because his paintings contain much more than “the actuality of what the eyes can see”. There are things in Hank’s paintings that might prove you have not really been looking very closely at the world. The truth Hank chooses to show, and choice is crucial, is well-planned and does not remind as much as surprise. Subtlety might have erringly described at an earlier date some of his work because it is rendered in a beautiful but remote style, not stylized or made to be perfect, but as exquisite blueprints for perfection. The magic is in expecting such a place to ever remain that way. A painting of Refugio Beach, for example, is more like how I remember Refugio than it is.

At Sullivan Goss, The Woman in The Clouds, serenely poolside by the Coral Casino, framed by stark white walls and umbrellas, is banal while epic and sets you to wonder about the heat over the mountains in Santa Ynez, underneath a developing cumulonimbus. She is perched in the middle of such a cloud and I know they are fickle clouds, for they portend but nearly never rain. Hank has often shown me a brand new way of seeing a place, a tree, a cloud formation I might have seen dozens of times. Take nothing for granted. And there is nothing to this painting about daydreaming.

Hank’s work has always been immune to the insecurities of faddish trends. The art world expects to invent a new school of painting arising with stars like they might lifted from the future’s history books. Perhaps with a less rambunctious Pollock this time around. Then the avant is arrogantly foisted off on a bewildered yet welcoming public that deserves much better. Such senselessness was what sent me running for the straightforward predictability of farming twenty-five years ago. I think it was the same week that Wolfgang Puck followed Julian Schnabel on the cover of dear old TIME magazine. The critical model seemed formulaic and I did not want to learn the code and and try to frame or explain more cult expressionism with gibberish sounding like Cantinflas on meth.

I went to a number of shows of then-current and obviously willful work then with Hank and I don’t remember a single thing he said either because there was nothing to say or what could be was better left unsaid. But I could not help getting pissed off and eventually looking for another challenge. I still did not know I was going to be a great writer yet, you see, but Hank had already cast his lot, which made it easier for him to ignore seasonal folly. Genius is probably quiet.

Through the years you will have looked at Hank’s paintings like you are compelled to muse on a sailing ship in a bottle, then once he has your attention, Hank suggests a narrative anecdote that may not be as charming as the cerulean sky behind the SoCal sunlit walls. Leisure Tension is one recurring theme. Vague Duality is another. A building’s white corners are cut uncomfortably against whimsical clouds in an evening sky. There is a beautiful figure that has been at the beach long enough to look uneasy, ready to go home in a fading light that now provokes purple shadows. Life can be surreptitiously spooky: is that the reflection of someone standing at pool’s edge, or a body? The lady sipping her frozen daiquiri is just as cold. I see the ocean and the Pink Drinks on the table, but what could that green lump be, looming toward shore?. That fleeting color is really what waves look like and what they do, just before they break, is turn iridescent with a green like a fresh Cal Trans sign. But this wave, its got a mind of its own. Its not nearly large enough to be threatening, but even if small you will want to pay attention to it as it dies.

In Clear Night, I know its foolish to imagine those six lights hovering near the luxurious pool are from a UFO, but Hank is not of much help. The gifted rendering of the swimming pools at night, especially in Night Swimming, with sunset’s last copper light fading to the west, evokes an often overlooked assumption about ubiquitous recreation in the languorous West. These are paintings that might make you think less about what they convey than how in the world Hank made them. All that violet and aquamarine, in a suddenly synthetic scene, must have fought like hell with those light bulbs just claiming the night.

A painting made standing at Nuns looks across Mira Mar cove to the sturdy wood-frame cottages shoulder to shoulder west of the old hotel. I say sturdy because I supposed the Pacific would have knocked them into kindling long ago, but this strand proves to be the most protected in all of Southern California. You will admire these little houses because they are very different though made of the same materials, and are of the same scale and architectural style. Their intricate background assemblage commands only a third of the canvas but its all you want to study. They have what we used to call character. Hopefully the people living in them are just as varied, but their homes have been abandoned in the midday Hank captures in View of Miramar Beach with Umbrella. It has to be summer because a salty haze has lifted from the warm beach on a dropping tide. The glazing vapors mute the colors across the cove as the landscape recedes.

Of all things, I am reminded of Angkor Wat. Not the tall towers, overwhelmed with jungle or pollution, but the stunning detail of the bas relief, of history chasing itself for four hundred feet, only to turn the corner and keep talking in sandstone. I have watched Hank stand in front of his own wall laying down straight unerring strokes as well. It’s the art, suddenly, not the artist that surfaces, with plenty of inspiration to match the heavy lifting. Hank has likely completed more than four hundred feet of his story and is in full command as he turns the corner.