Current Exhibitions
“Anne Ward: Painted Seasons”
On view March 15, 2025, to July 6, 2025
Anne Ward grew up in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, wanting to be an artist. She was always painting and drawing and was given her first set of oil paints by her Aunt Peg at age 13. After completing a degree in history at UCLA, Ward went to work as an assistant to the director on films like “Wyatt Earp” and “French Kiss.” While working in France, Anne discovered the thrill of painting outdoors and returned home fully devoted to the pursuit of painting.
Primarily self-taught, Ward has been painting and exhibiting for the past 30 years. In the early days, when her children were small, she painted in her kitchen while her family slept, and sketched while waiting in the school pickup line. Around 2009, Anne began using an iPad and the Procreate app as a fundamental tool in her daily practice. Acting as a veritable “studio tucked in her purse,” the iPad enables Ward to experiment and work through ideas before she paints with oils or, more recently, acrylic.
Anne sees the world in terms of light, shape, color, and pattern. A successful painting balances all four elements in a way that resonates with calm, joy, and hope. Today Anne paints primarily in her garden in Ojai, where she and her husband, the writer and painter Ian Roberts, settled in 2023. She loves growing food and flowers and often plants things with the thought of what will make a good painting. Tending to and painting her garden roots Anne in the present moment and quiets the noise of her overactive mind.
The garden also helps Ward reconcile and appreciate the inevitability of the changing seasons, whether it is light shifting over the course of a day; the transition from the greens of spring to the yellows of summer; or the transformative period in life that comes after loss. The titles of her works often reference the time of day, or year, or life. Ultimately, the art of Anne Ward is about embracing the “season of now” and recognizing what is lost, what is gained, and what will bloom again.
Below is a sampling of artworks featured in the exhibition. Click on any image to enlarge.
"Plein Air Visions" Presented by the California Art Club
On view May 10, 2025, to September 7, 2025
The California Art Club is one of the oldest, largest, and most active art organizations in the country. Founded in Los Angeles in 1909 by a small group of California Impressionist painters, the CAC now has members worldwide, including artists, art students, patrons, and collectors who value the practices of traditional fine arts in the fields of painting, drawing, and sculpture.
The California Impressionist style of painting flourished in the years between 1900 and 1930, during a time when California’s population, including its artistic community, was booming. California Impressionists borrowed from the earlier French Impressionism movement, emphasizing the effects of natural light on the landscape, looser forms and brushwork, and a love of painting en plein air, or outdoors. (California’s idyllic beauty and perpetual sunshine allow for year-round plein air painting.)
With the rise of modernism after 1930, traditional landscape painting fell out of favor, but it experienced a revival in the 1980s. The California Art Club looked to its founders for inspiration and reasserted itself as a community of artists working in a range of styles and media who exhibit together, exchange ideas, and support one another.
While not without its challenges (weather, insects, hauling gear), painting outdoors is a rewarding, multisensory experience that inspires a more accurate understanding of colors and light in nature. It requires artists to work more efficiently and lends a greater sense of feeling and authenticity to their work.
“Plein Air Visions” features two dozen current members of the Los Angeles and Malibu/Ventura Chapters of CAC. Their works celebrate the preeminence of the plein air technique in capturing the light and colors of California’s coastal and urban landscape, with scenes stretching from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles.
Learn more about the California Art Club at www.californiaartclub.org
