Current Exhibitions
“Anne Ward: Painted Seasons”
On view March 15, 2025, to July 6, 2025
Anne Ward grew up in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, wanting to be an artist. She was always painting and drawing and was given her first set of oil paints by her Aunt Peg at age 13. After completing a degree in history at UCLA, Ward went to work as an assistant to the director on films like “Wyatt Earp” and “French Kiss.” While working in France, Anne discovered the thrill of painting outdoors and returned home fully devoted to the pursuit of painting.
Primarily self-taught, Ward has been painting and exhibiting for the past 30 years. In the early days, when her children were small, she painted in her kitchen while her family slept, and sketched while waiting in the school pickup line. Around 2009, Anne began using an iPad and the Procreate app as a fundamental tool in her daily practice. Acting as a veritable “studio tucked in her purse,” the iPad enables Ward to experiment and work through ideas before she paints with oils or, more recently, acrylic.
Anne sees the world in terms of light, shape, color, and pattern. A successful painting balances all four elements in a way that resonates with calm, joy, and hope. Today Anne paints primarily in her garden in Ojai, where she and her husband, the writer and painter Ian Roberts, settled in 2023. She loves growing food and flowers and often plants things with the thought of what will make a good painting. Tending to and painting her garden roots Anne in the present moment and quiets the noise of her overactive mind.
The garden also helps Ward reconcile and appreciate the inevitability of the changing seasons, whether it is light shifting over the course of a day; the transition from the greens of spring to the yellows of summer; or the transformative period in life that comes after loss. The titles of her works often reference the time of day, or year, or life. Ultimately, the art of Anne Ward is about embracing the “season of now” and recognizing what is lost, what is gained, and what will bloom again.
Below is a sampling of artworks featured in the exhibition. Click on any image to enlarge.
“A Brush with Nature: Three Artists’ Perspectives”
On view January 18, 2025, to May 4, 2025
Sandy Fisher, Mardilan Lee Georgio, and Charlotte Mullich highly recommend joining your local arts organization. The three friends met through the Santa Clarita Artists Association and later formed their own modest alliance to trade advice and support one another. All three women began their professional fine art careers later in life after raising children, though Charlotte has been teaching art for many years and all were encouraged towards the arts from a young age.
While the three artists dabble in a wide variety of media, each finds herself drawn to a particular medium distinct from one another. Sandy favors oils. Mardilan prefers pastels. Charlotte is partial to watercolors. All three are traditional representational artists inspired by the beauty of nature but with singular perspectives. Exhibited together, the trio offers viewers a colorful crash course in the visual characteristics that distinguish their chosen artistic mediums and the unique sensibilities each medium and each artist can lend to a work of art.
Watercolor painting is widely regarded as an unforgiving vehicle, but Mullich gravitates towards its translucent and luminous effects. As a longtime art teacher, she appreciates the discipline required to wield waterborne pigments, which complement her illustrative style of rendering small flora and fauna. Georgio is attracted to the tactile nature of working with pastels, which places her body in direct connection with her medium, echoing her early years as a dancer. Using soft pastels gives her landscapes and seascapes an impressionistic quality she adores. For Fisher, her preference toward oil painting largely stems from her love of plein air painting. Painting outdoors replaced her affinity for hiking after a second cancer diagnosis necessitated a change in how she engages with nature. The slow-drying, reworkable medium is especially conducive to working in the field.
With three different mediums in hand, the intent of this small artist collective is one and the same: to showcase the value of the natural world in our everyday lives and inspire others to recognize, preserve, and protect it.
