A Friendly Abstracting Nature

In the painting used as a poster image and logo for Carolyn Hubbs’s exhibition Abstracted, a vibrant swirl of gestures in a palette of happy hues goes by the telling title “Tree Creating Itself.” Deconstructed visions of nature and an abstracting nature meet here and get along very well. In a way, the title and implication of forms and scenery creating themselves — and reinventing themselves — might be a mission statement for the colorful but ever-searching expressive world where Hubbs’s aesthetic lives.

Hubbs is a local artist deserving wider recognition, a prolific art-maker whose work has occasionally popped up in such forums as Sullivan Goss’s 100 Grand show. On the fuller overview basis of Abstracted, her first solo exhibition in Santa Barbara, Hubbs is on to something. Working in a style involving abstracting scenes and sites from travel and nature, she has created a personal voice, a contemporary signature style accessible enough to gratify even
traditionalists.

Hints of art historical reference also trickle through her work at times, as do references to the rhythms and harmony of music — that most abstract of the arts. We can easily make parallels to Stuart Davis’s jazzy geometric jumbles in her painting “Chorus Line/Autumn,” a many-colored yet spare and, yes, dance-like aggregation of lines and gestures. The triptych “East End” is reminiscent of art of the past, from Jean Arp’s shape shifting to Matisse’s playful and exuberant colorful cutouts.

We can also see the influence of the deftly balanced and juggled forms of Ellsworth Kelly, the subject of an exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art a year ago, and Richard Diebenkorn’s geometric design scheming can be detected in paintings such as “Fog Bank.” But most importantly, Hubbs folds these touchstones into a style to call her own.

A window into Hubbs’s process of arriving at a “finished” painting works its way into the show, as well, through the numerous sketches behind glass, serving as pre-history/preliminary exploratory stage of her work. And yet these sketchier, slighter pieces deserve love and attention, too, as respectable images in and of themselves.

Hubbs’s “Annunciation” finds its own path through the deep artworld tradition of the Biblical “annunciation” theme, in a neo-constructivist concoction somehow both orderly and intuitively arrived-at. The epiphanic “annunciation” moment is contained in a small burst of orange at the center — whether signifying a flame, birds having flown, or a sacred visitation, depending on the observer’s interpretive inclinations.

Coming full circle back to vestiges of nature, a recurring hearth in Hubbs’s art, the piece “In the Orchard” is the most direct visual “quote” from a natural source in the gallery. Leaves and other recognizable components of a tree are transformed in a reductive way, as if said tree is creating itself.

For Hubbs, the creative energy circle continues and pleases the mind’s eye.

Abstracted by Carolyn Hubbs is on view at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara Gallery (229 E. Victoria St.) through November 2. The gallery hours are Saturdays 1-4 p.m. and weekdays by appointment. See afsb.org/programs/art-gallery for more information.