FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park
4800 Hollywood Blvd. 90027 * 213/485-8665
to Feature Barrie Mottishaw’s Field Notes from Exurbia
May 13 - June 26, 2005

Well-known California artist documents development’s encroachments on the natural landscape.
CLAREMONT, Calif. (Oct. 6, 2004) – Barrie Mottishaw, a well-known painter of the changing California landscape, will open an exhibition of her work, Field Notes from Exurbia, at Pitzer College’s Nichols Gallery Nov. 1-Dec. 4. The exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery from May 13 through June 26, 2005.

The artist will be on hand for the opening reception at Pitzer from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 5.
Mottishaw, a veteran Los Angeles painter, and a visiting professor in Creative Studies at Pitzer, has been documenting Western landscape in flux since she returned from British Columbia, Canada, in the late 1970s. She has shown her work extensively in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1980s.
In this exhibition Mottishaw turns her attention to the recent housing phenomenon known as exurbia – the type of land development that is swallowing open space throughout the West. The exhibition focuses on Mottishaw’s working field methods by presenting notebooks, plein air (on site) studies, as well as 10 finished studio paintings.

“Barrie Mottishaw and her paintings are intimately connected to the landscape: its history, texture, scale, colors, literature, and its future,” Michael Woodcock, Pitzer professor of Creative Studies, explains in his forward to the beautiful catalogue that accompanies the show. “She has trekked the urban, suburban and exurban, traveling across parking lots, through subdivisions, down the LA River channel and up the San Andreas Fault.”

“We’ve all seen it – the new American landscape beyond suburbia,” writes Mark Johnstone in the main catalogue essay. “Whole communities formed, almost within a single season, on land that had formerly been prairie, desert, or agriculture. Exit an interstate, and instantly emerge into an environment of giant shopping malls and residential housing clusters that seemingly stretch to the horizon."
“During thirty years of painting on site and in the studio, Mottishaw has evolved a poetic style which can be described as part 19th-century Romantic Sublime, part L.A. noir,” observes Koplin Del Rio Gallery on its Web site www.koplindelrio.com. “In this way the work evokes both the centuries old tradition of beauty in landscape painting as well as a more contemporary sense of urban malaise that comes from L.A.'s cinematic history.”

The trajectory of Mottishaw’s artistic working practice has been charted in a variety of magazine articles as well as exhibition reviews in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, USC’s California Artists Postcard Series and The California Artists Calendar 1990, ArtSphere (the magazine of the California International Art Foundation), San Diego Union Tribune, Artweek Magazine, the Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Weekly, and the Claremont Courier. Reproductions of the artist's work have appeared in the magazines L.A. Architect, Connections, Wild Earth, and The Jewish Journal (London).
Her paintings can be seen in several university and museum collections, including the Orange County Museum of Art, University of California Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the City of Santa Monica Art Bank. Mottishaw’s work has been acquired by private corporations and foundations such as Bank of America, Nestle Corporation, Peter and Eileen Norton Family Foundation, Deloitte and Touche LLP, Smith Barney, Payden and Rygel. It can also be found in the collections of private individuals throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

A full-color, 36-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.