Wendy Schwartz and Bruce Mitchell, friends and Inverness neighbors for over 30 years, work in different dimensions: Wendy is a painter while Bruce sculpts wood. But we are lucky that Wendy, scheduled to hold her show at Toby’s Feed Barn’s art gallery, asked Bruce to join her. These twin solo shows at the gallery stand strongly on their own but also enrich each other, as they each explore the poetic and practical beauty of West Marin’s and California’s landscape.
Wendy’s oil paintings make me think of Edward Hopper in West Marin. Her scenes of vernacular architecture, like Saint Mary’s Church in Nicasio or the brick buildings at the edge of small towns, have a timeless quality of “places that appear no longer lived-in but suggest a past story,” as Wendy put it to me. In a part of the world filled with stunning vistas, Wendy chooses to paint “the part that isn’t postcard perfect.” She does not edit out the electrical conduit on the side of a building or the crooked telephone pole with its drooping wires.
Wendy also demonstrates a love of the luscious local landscape, with moody skies highlighting a luminous slice of light on the horizon or the complex layers of shadows playing on the tidal flats. “White Walls” is quintessential Wendy Schwartz to me, with its collection of three, lovely, old white buildings, seen in part rather than in full, against a dark gray sky.
Wendy does venture beyond West Marin, but whatever she paints—whether Joshua Tree National Park or Alaska’s Inside Passage—she is most attracted to scenes where something is going on with the light. Her light tends to be blue rather than golden, creating a visual sense of melancholy, which asks us to notice and care for her subjects the way that she has done by selecting them.
Wendy has a deep love of the land itself, which she believes grounds her as a person as well as an artist. Her paintings are a never-ending dance of sky and cloud, water and land. Her home and studio are situated low on the grassy edge of Tomales Bay, at the very edge of the San Andreas Fault. Perhaps it is this perspective that produces a worldview that is not sentimental but rather filled with a kind of affectionate realism.
Bruce Mitchell’s elegant two-and three-dimensional works include both functional and sculptural forms in wood. Beginning as an apprentice to sculptor J.B. Blunk, he worked on the iconic redwood burl seating sculpture “Planet” that Blunk created for the Oakland Museum in 1969.
Bruce’s work reflects both Blunk’s love of California’s native woods and his teacher’s familiarity with the forms of the 20th-century Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. “Solstice Stone,” which features a rectangular cavity in its center, beautifully combines both of these elements, as well as being Bruce’s personal homage to the standing stones of the British Isles and his fascination with the cosmology of those peoples who had such a deep understanding of the land and the seasons.
Some of Bruce’s work, like the table and stools, is functional as well as beautiful. The wood in Bruce’s lovely redwood burl table is so rugged and dynamic that he described it as looking like “one is flying over a mountain range.” For another piece, he created a stool in the shape of a butterfly as part of a commission calling for 32 such pieces carved from 12 by 12 old-growth timbers, maximizing function while minimizing weight.
Bruce’s newest pieces in this exhibition are four wall-mounted kimonos from a series that was inspired by his long-time love of textiles and an exhibition of kimonos he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year. Several pieces from Bruce’s lifetime collection of wood specimens, including curly redwood that looks like “water flowing over rocks in a stream bed,” were sanded down to the same thickness, from which he created the symmetrical compositions that resemble a kind of archetypical butterfly.
It is clear that Bruce’s mind is always exploring, combining things he has seen from a lifetime of studying art and culture. As he said, “One of my definitions of an artist is someone who is always discovering something new.”
The exhibition of Wendy’s paintings and Bruce’s sculpture reflect their easy collaboration, which for the lucky viewer is far more than the sum of its parts. Their work and their lives are united by their strong sense of admiration for this remarkable place where they live.
Wendy Schwartz and Bruce Mitchell’s exhibition at the art gallery at Toby’s Feed Barn runs through Nov. 29.
Susan Page Tillett lives in Inverness. She is the executive director of the Mesa Refuge, a writers’ retreat in Point Reyes Station. She moved to West Marin in 2013 after 30 years of supporting the work of writers and artists in Chicago.