Santa Barbara, CA - My Pet Ram is pleased to present Hoist Up the John B. Sail featuring new work by Brian Scott Campbell and Michael McGregor.  Please join us in the Funk Zone for the opening reception on Saturday, July 15th from 6-9pm.

Waiting for grand gestures to define one’s life is a fool’s errand. There is a perpetual ebb and flow of anticipation and disappointment that is inextricable from an existence constructed around prescribed events. Even if the long-awaited day lives up to the hype, what do you do after it’s done? Instead, it should be the little moments, the casual experiences, and the small instances of beauty in the mundane that hold our attention and fill our lives with meaning. Gazing out at the ocean from a sandy towel, feeling the breeze on your face as it fills the sails, or sketching a simple table arrangement on a quiet Sunday morning help to separate us from the daily grind and the crushing expectations of a world where nothing is ever enough. 

The works presented in Hoist Up the John B. Sail ask us to put aside the end goal in order to enjoy the journey and ruminate on the interstitial time between actions. Like roughhewn sketches started after breakfast and abandoned when the surf came in, they tread the line between casual doodles and a careful study of painterly space and tradition. Both Brian Scott Campbell and Michael McGregor prioritize a loose application of paint and leisurely subject matter in service of a more intimate reverie. Their investigation of historic tropes infuses conventional subjects with more immediate energy that problematizes the seeming neutrality of landscape and still-life genres. Sailboats, bottles, and beach towels filled with personal effects litter the canvases as the artists examine the divide between contemporary painting and the common themes of every seaside gallery from Santa Barbara to Southampton to Sardinia.

Campbell’s nautical arrangements and geometric views are equal parts Malevich and Cezanne. They combine the spatial order of the former with a Post-Impressionist marriage of material and subject. White triangles become billowing sails, red circles the setting sun, and brushy interlocking shapes vacillate between abstraction and the call of a distant coastline. “The rudimentary lines and simple geometries are employed as easily grasped building blocks,” the artist explains. “And yet, each careful arrangement suggests an evolving yet fragmentary narrative, a story with no distinct time of day or night, a fictional domain manifested by the act and materiality of painting.” Canvases like Boat 2 (2022) are striking for their perplexing combination of austerity and soothing familiarity. By leveraging a distinct iconography of simplified shapes, uneven white outlines, and muted colors, Campbell appeals to our need for calm.

In McGregor’s work, the time-honored tradition of still-life painting merges with common objects and the everyday. Vanitas and items of affluence are replaced by sport radios, sunglasses, and open bottles of Campari. Embodying an air of informal existence, works like The Deuce is Still Wild (2023) are specific in their iconography (as the artist frequently draws from the same objects in the studio) but universal in the way that they embody new relationships with the ordinary. His subjects are the opposite of monumental, but the arrangements point toward a rich lived experience. The titles all reference classic American songs by Bruce Springsteen, The Beach Boys, etc. which the artist played on repeat while traveling through European seaside towns with a long history of artistic inspiration. They appeal to our nostalgic side as we reminisce about lyrics on the radio and humid evenings trudging back from the water’s edge in the half-dark to sandy towels. “I always joked, semi-seriously,” notes McGregor, “that I just want to be a painter by the sea.” This duality is clear in works like Paradise Ain’t So Crowded (2023), where the painterly application is intentionally free and relaxed while the subject recalls the airy neo-Impressionism found in coastal hamlets where life is slow and there is time to paint.

Nodding toward Raphael Rubinstein’s notion of provisional painting, pieces like Campbell’s Paddle (2023) are major works masquerading as small studies. The departure from historical tropes of serious, stuffy subjects creates a lighthearted atmosphere that invites viewers into a realm they know and want to engage in. Caught off guard by the scumble of paint and uneven surfaces in both artists’ work, one is more apt to consider the composition and draw connections to sunny moments and the minutiae of seasons past than to moralizing compositions or romantic notions of the sublime. Though carefully constructed, both artists utilize a looser style that dispenses with any pretense in an effort to be as direct and relatable as possible. In doing so, Hoist Up the John B. Sail provides a welcome respite from the drudgery of daily life as both painters subvert traditions and ask for a reexamination of historical tropes. Chasing the endless summer may sometimes seem impossible in a world so shrouded in darkness and deadlines, but Campbell and McGregor remind us that simple pleasures can fortify us in the face of overwhelming adversity.

Hoist Up the John B. Sail will be on view beginning Saturday, July 15 through Sunday, August 27, 2023. The gallery is located at 16 Helena Avenue, just off of Cabrillo Blvd in the Funk Zone. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Monday from 12-6pm and by appointment. Closed on Tuesdays. For more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.