Barrie Mottishaw at the Municipal Art Gallery

For over 25 years, painter Barrie Mottishaw has been documenting the effects of sprawl in Southern California in a process somewhat akin to a field biologist's rigorous studies of the natural world. In the works in this exhibition, "Field Notes from Exurbia," she presented plein-air watercolor sketches and larger oil works that retain a fresh, brushy realism, plus Iooseleaf binders filled with details of location, weather and travel routes.

The influence of 20th-century formalism pervades the organization of her canvases into wide bands of sky and foreground. However, Mottishaw's roots lie in the 19th-century American panoramic landscape tradition of big, luminous skies with dramatic weather patterns, distant purple mountains, infinite horizons, wide open spaces and apparently inexhaustible forests. The degree of optimism and belief in "progress" of that era seems to live on in what we see here, but there is another story being told.

Mottishaw does not overtly propaqandize against the rape of western lands in her paintings. Instead, she patiently and meticulously records postmodern mini-malls, fast-food outlets, gas stations, house-studded chaparral, vast parking lots, high-tension power lines, freeways slicing through vacant land, and verdant hillsides lopped off and graded for development. In the great forward thrust of economic growth, housing displaces ranch- and farmland, concrete paves over natural habitats and artificial lighting outshines the stars.

Across the Dry River (2004) and In the Wash (2003) depict stereotypical California tract housing situated on the horizon line of a bright sun-washed landscape, not unlike medieval Tuscan villages above their surrounding fields. Here and in canvases such as Fenceline (2003), in which a recreational path and chain-link fence separate a gated community from the countryside, human dwellings appear poised midway between wilderness and civilization, heaven and earth.

Mottishaw's is an inclusive view where the prosaic and the beautiful stand on equal ground. Her work implies that our salvation lies neither in progress nor in a return to nature, but in maintaining a conscientious balance between the two.

--Constance Mallinson

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