Join us at the Santa Paula Art Museum on Saturday, September 19, 2026, for the premiere of a special retrospective exhibition honoring the late Ventura painter Gail Faulkner (1947-2023), who devoted the final two decades of her life to watercolor painting. In her exquisitely detailed still lifes, fruits and flowers are arranged alongside treasured baskets and pottery from her own collection, revealing her remarkable skill and the immense joy she found in painting.
Admission to the premiere party is $5 for SPAM members and $10 for non-members. Gail Faulkner: A Lasting Impression will be on view from September 19, 2026, to January 10, 2027.
More About Gail Faulkner:
Born in New Jersey in 1947, Gail Faulkner came into the world with a passion for art. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t drawing, painting, or creating something. As a high school student, she fell in love with the realism of the Old Masters during visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum.
At the urging of her parents, Gail pursued a career in science, working as an X-ray technician in special procedures for 17 years, but she continued practicing art in her free time. Looking for a change in her 30s, Faulkner studied fine and commercial art at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Sanski Art Center in Haddonfield, New Jersey. She moved to California in 1981, where she continued her art studies at UCLA and began a successful second career as a graphic designer.
In 2003, Faulkner took a watercolor painting workshop and devoted herself to the medium for the final two decades of her life, studying under artists including Norman Kirk and Paul Jackson. Kirk encouraged Faulkner’s interest in the highly detailed, Dutch Masters–style realism that came to define her work. Faulkner began exhibiting her work across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in 2008 and soon earned numerous first-place awards from organizations including the Santa Paula Art Show, California Gold Coast Watercolor Society, and Buenaventura Art Association.
Faulkner was an artist member of the California Art Club, an Artist of Distinction with American Women Artists, and an active member of the Museum of Ventura County’s Fine Arts Committee for many years. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the City of Oxnard, Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura, and the Santa Paula Art Museum.
Gail Faulkner died in Ventura in 2023.
Header Image: Untitled by Gail Faulkner, Watercolor on paper, 17 x 20 inches, Collection of the Santa Paula Art Museum, Gift of Bill Faulkner.