CCS was honored to showcase 50 individuals and activities during our 50th Anniversary in 2017-2018 to share our rich history. Take a look at the amazing people responsible for making our unconventional College possible!   

Rolling hills bathed in golden late afternoon light greet students as they arrive at the Sedgwick Reserve for a course in field painting. The breeze is welcome given the heat of the day, and the growing shadows appear to beckon to a nearly idyllic educational experience for the students enrolled in the CCS course “Field Painting with an Artist and a Naturalist.”

But what is it really like? Traumatic, brutal, a challenge that each will regret more times than they’ll ever want to confess. Here’s what it feels like… You step out of your car, take hold of your easel and equipment as though you know what you are doing. But what are you supposed to paint? There’s no end, no margins, and everything is all around you in three dimensions. No, worse. You can see even in your first ten minutes that time is against you, snatching and dragging those promising shadows into totally new shapes. What now? Is anyone going to tell you what to do? How to do it? There’s nothing here that looks like a painting. There’s too much and it has no structure or sense. And there’s that fly biting your wrist. No one told you vampires were included.

Yet at the end of the course, the reviews come in, and like so many difficult passages, this one too gives great rewards. Through eight mornings and afternoons at Sedgwick, the students repeatedly wrestle with composition, color and predicting in their minds the course of lengthening shadows as afternoon passes towards sunset. As they do, they gain greater confidence, developing painting expertise or honing it, and learning not only about painting, but also about the nature of the hills, the plants and the natural history of the landscape in which they have immersed themselves.

Through eight mornings and afternoons at Sedgwick, the students repeatedly wrestle with composition, color and predicting in their minds the course of lengthening shadows as afternoon passes towards sunset.

The course began 19 years ago, the culmination of a conversation between Hank Pitcher, local artist and CCS Art Instructor, and Bruce Ti­ffney, botanist, paleontologist, and former Dean of the College of Creative Studies. Tiff­ney recalls, “Hank and I long ago agreed that art and science are both about observation; the distinction lies in how those observations are recorded. In science, the individuality of the scientist is constrained by a common language and protocol to try to ensure everyone understands precisely what is being communicated; there is no room for individual nuance. By contrast in art, the power of the resulting work is dependent upon the insightfulness of the artist and how individuals capture the essence of the scene before them. However, as artists, they need to be able to fully understand what they are observing, to ‘truly see it’ so that they can then instill their own perspective as a conscious act. This is difficult, as so many of us operate on the ‘automatic self’ where preconception makes us see what we expect we are looking at, rather than what is there. By example, we all expect that trees have brown trunks and green foliage because that is our typology of trees. However, most trees have grey or multicolored trunks, and foliage that ranges from green to red, yellow, blue, white, purple, depending upon the time of day, lighting, and the actual leaves. Look, and if you have the sight of a scientist or an artist, you will see, rather than simply suppose.”

The course spans three weekends and two separate locations: The Sedgewick Reserve and Coal Oil Point. In addition to painting, students’ days are filled with demonstrations and brief lectures focused upon the biological, geological and artistic aspects of these two great Natural Reserves. The schedule of painting during the day optimizes painting conditions. For instance, it is critical that the artists paint at very low light angles, meaning that they must rise early (around 6:00 am) to begin their painting. They continue until the sun is high in the sky when it e­ffectively “flattens” everything out in terms of lighting, minimizing shadows. The artists then take a midday break and begin painting again in the late afternoon, continuing on until it gets dark, again taking advantage of the long light angles. Throughout the course, they enjoy meals catered by a local chef, who uses only local ingredients for her very creative meals. After each painting session, all of the students hang their recent work, and a “crit” takes place in which instructors and students discuss each piece to understand the vision, and intentions, and to help solve technical problems. Finally, they wind down and retire to their tents, exhausted.

Most students will complete about 14 paintings over the course of the three weekends. At the end, they line all of the paintings up sequentially by order of creation. The result is often startling, with marked changes in style, handling and skill from the first to the final paintings.

Developing the ability to observe as an artist and a scientist is a skill anyone can learn. In fact, the unofficial tagline for this course is “you don’t have to be an artist to take this course.” Both Hank and Bruce insist that you might even get more out of the course if you are a less experienced artist. The experience teaches both the techniques necessary to “capture” the natural landscape through painting plus an introduction to the features of geology and flora that make a particular landscape distinctive. The class is open to all majors across campus, and to students at all levels, as well as to members of the community through the UCSB Extension Open University. The only requirement is an interest in the natural world and the desire to make it come to life on canvas.