Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present Patricia Chidlaw, the gallery’s fifth showing of the Southern California artist’s oil paintings. The exhibition features Chidlaw’s new urban landscape paintings focusing on the greater Los Angeles region and continues through May 2nd.
Patricia Chidlaw is endlessly attracted to light: to the changing light of morning and evening, to shadows at play over Los Angeles, to the subtle shades of the color in the sky and clouds. While natural light is omnipresent in her work, Chidlaw is deeply drawn to the concrete and steel of the constructed world. The interaction of the natural and human-made is at the core of Chidlaw’s work: power-lines, painted out graffiti, shadows of palm trees, and angles of architecture come together in the compositions in her distinctive portrait of Los Angeles.
The paintings speak to the grit and beauty of this sprawling and complicated metropolis. Chidlaw is pushing her exploration color and perspective in these new paintings. Reflections in pools create compositions that boarder on abstraction – geometries at play through light and shadow and shape.
There is an intimacy to the spaces Chidlaw is drawn to – the city skyline hovers in the distance but Chidlaw is directing the viewer’s eye to what is nearby, a figure is illuminated in a window off to one side, iconic Hollywood sights are an aside to the sunset in the distance. Chidlaw is depicting the everyday views many of us pass without looking twice – asking that we take a moment to see what she sees – to see the beauty in the mundane – the wonder in the moment.
Patricia Chidlaw (b. 1951) received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has exhibited extensively on the West Coast and at numerous art fairs throughout the US. In 2014, she was the subject of a solo exhibition, Realm of the Commonplace – Paintings by Patricia Chidlaw, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, NV. Her work appears in many private collections and has been featured in THE Magazine, ArtScene, Southwest Art, Artweek, and on KCET. She lives and works in Santa Barbara.
