Capturing the Beautiful and Unspoiled

By Josef Woodard

Newspress Correspondent

Rick Garcia has been around Santa Barbara for many years now, displaying his conspicuous artistic skill in commercial and fine art contexts, with paintings popping up in group shows more regularly of late.

What we find in his wonderful one-person show at the Delphine Gallery is a painter with a refined and mature idea about what he's up to. Part of that agenda is explained by the exhibition's title "Santa Barbara Sky." While the paintings reveal that Garcia is busily admiring the idyllic indigenous Santa Barbara surroundings - like the OAK Group painters, nonaffiliated landscape painters and you and I - he expresses that admiration in his own particular way, basking in the light properties emanating from the sky, or generally looking upward or inward as much as straight ahead.

With his sure-handed painterly style, Garcia applies a living, unsparing gaze at specific features of palm trees, for instance. Palm trees seem to loom with a quiet heroism in some of the best paintings in the show. "Evening Fog Over Canary Palms" takes in the tops of palms, in the dramatizing light of afternoon yielding to evening, framed against gently stormy skies. It's difficult not to read the vertically pitched painting

"Las Positas Kings" as a cross between arboreal realism and portraiture, the essence of these two tall and hairy specimens suggesting a pair of lived-in lovers.

Going more macroscopic, Garcia also tightens up for the ultra close-up views of the strange, quasi-mystical agave plant, it's branches cryptically gobbling up the compositional space. "Agave Dreamscape #9" finds the plant cropped as if in a detail from a larger floral view. By it's elliptical logical, what we don't see enlivens what we do.

Whether ironically or not , Garcia pulls back for longer views of landscapes, but on smaller canvases. In these more panoramic visions, his interest is keyed into the sensuous qualities of light almost more than the terrain, however inherently beautiful and unspoiled. "Afternoon Fog" is a wide small canvas in which the gradated effect of fog burning off imparts a glowing tension in the composition.

Better yet "Jalama Light" is one of the finest pieces in the room. In a manner reminiscent of 19th century European landscape painting more than current local fashion or anything you might expect from the famed surf spot of Jalama, Garcia's painting is a moody wallflower in the show. It's a muted depiction of a patch of oak filled land, subtly punctuated by marching fence posts and rendered celestial through the careful consideration of atmospheric daylight. Nature and sentient paintings are in sync, in the painting, and the show generally. Garcia is someone to watch out for.