Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara — Meredith Books Abbott’s New Art Book

A NEW BOOK ON

MEREDITH BROOKS ABBOTT

HAS JUST BEEN PUBLISHED

SANTA BARBARA — Following a multi-year effort to gather images of paintings by one of Santa Barbara’s best known and most beloved plein air painters, Sullivan Goss is proud to announce the publication of the first hardbound monograph devoted to the art of MEREDITH BROOKS ABBOTT.

Beautifully bound in sage green linen with soft gold debossed type and with 145 full color plates plus assorted illustrations, the gallery hopes that the book will be as treasured as the artist has been over her long career. Almost six decades of painting are represented.

The book also features short written notes from other respected members of Santa Barbara’s art community including curator Susan Bush of Sullivan Goss, painter and fellow OAK group member Arturo Tello, daughter and fellow OAK group member Whitney Brooks Abbott, former gallery owners Marlene Miller (Arlington Gallery), Ellen Easton (Easton Gallery), and Maureen Murphy (Maureen Murphy Fine Arts), and with sweet stories shared by her sons Robert and William Abbottas well as her granddaughter Gwen McTigue. The book concludes with a selected chronology of the artist’s life and career.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

MEREDITH BROOKS ABBOTT (b. 1938) was one of five born in Carpinteria, California, four of whom became artists. As a teenager, she studied with painters like Richard Meryman, Douglass Parshall, and Clarence Hinkle, making her a living link to the first generation of California impressionist painters. She and her husband Duncan also own a farm in Carpinteria, where she grows some of what she paints. In 1986, she was one of the founding members of the OAK Group – a group that has painted the landscape for preservation. She has shown with many of the city’s most respected and long-lived art galleries and has sold over 1,500 paintings to a collector base numbering in the hundreds. Her work celebrates the produce, the flowers, the architecture, and especially, the landscape of Santa Barbara county. Both her daughter Whitney Brooks Abbott and her late sister Whitney Brooks Hansen were also OAK Group members, making their family one of the true dynastic art families of Southern California.

Meredith Brooks Abbot will have a solo exhibition with Sullivan Goss in May of this year.

50 early copies will be available for purchase at the opening on 1st Thursday, May 6th.