SULLIVAN GOSS – An American Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition called HANK PITCHER: TIDAL FORCE,  their first exhibition in three years for celebrated West Coast painter Hank Pitcher.  Painting at sites that are difficult to access, Pitcher’s new exhibition reaffirms his commitment to preserving a painted record of one California’s most pristine and bio-diverse coastlines while preserving and advancing the tradition of representational landscape and figure painting.
 
Paintings, like coastlines, are formed in a gradual process of accretion and attrition, with warm colors and cool colors pushing and pulling at each other like warm and cool ocean currents.  In no other painter’s work are the dynamics of attack and retreat over time harnessed to a more resonant or beautiful effect than in the work of Hank Pitcher.  Both his process and his paintings reflect his long and harmonious relationship with the California Coast as a painter, teacher and surfer.  Over thirty-five years as a professional artist, Hank has seen a number of currents in the art world; he has seen the “death” and “rebirth” of painting again and again. With typical California cool, he has done his own thing just the same.  He has gone outside and made paintings of mountains and sea, of surfers and their rides, of life in California.
 
Blending an East Coast figurative sensibility reminiscent of Fairfield Porter with a West Coast tradition that shares as much with late Bay Area Figurative painting as with Southern Californian proto Pop experiments, Pitcher has developed a language of form, color, stroke and iconography that sets him apart in the history of American art. Furthermore, the reductive quality of his flattened shapes and his use of un-modulated colors recall the sparse Realism of Edward Hopper.  With tidal force, he continues to bend the trajectory of American landscape and figure painting.

Also on view: FLORABUNDANCE: Three Artists for Spring through July 31, Ray Strong: Heaven, Earth
and Everything in Between through July 3, Stills from a Life’s Cinema: Colin Campbell Cooper through
July 3, and THE SUMMER SALON of the Artists at Sullivan Goss through July 3. 

HANK PITCHER: TIDAL FORCE June 2, 2011 – August 28, 2011
 
www.sullivangoss.com/exhibits/SGTV_hankpitcher2011/
 
PRESS CONTACT:   Diana McNeill (805) 730-1460 • diana@sullivangoss.com