by Ben Golombek
If it wasn’t the biggest crowd to ever stuff into the Manhattan Beach Creative Arts Center, it certainly felt like it as the three-part exhibit, curated by Ann Martin, hosted much of our community in its opening last Friday.
The show featured work from Manhattan Beach locals Brent Broza, Robert Waxman and Tricia Strickfaden, along with two designer surfboards created by Brad Stevenson.
Closest to the front door, Broza’s photography greeted patrons with candid accounts of the Strand’s most titanic forces. “Six Man” is a large print dizzyingly stuffed with beach volleyball gatherers in “Where’s Waldo?” fashion. “Mud Pit” frames thousands of gallons of water as it heaves into a curl – the sort of image only someone truly familiar with the ocean would know.
And know the ocean Broza does. The artist’s journey with film began four years ago at his father’s Hawaii home, where he was repeatedly drawn to the beach to capture the beauty of “sunset-time.” The foggy pier scene of “Misty Morning” reflects this natural culmination, somehow finding a way to frame something normally impossible to express – how the ocean feels. Perhaps that, after all, is the most titanic force Brent documents at “California Cruisin’”.
Curator Martin noted that oil painter Waxman “does all of his work ‘en plein air’”. This means that Waxman sits in the outdoor setting he captures, as opposed to a studio, while he works. Waxman’s calm scenes capture the atmosphere and emotion of each setting so clearly that you get a feeling for what it would have sounded like to be there. You hear the crunch of sand underneath the feet of a surfer walking up the stairs in “16th St.” and the hum of fading traffic below as day slips into night in “California St.” Waxman says he feels like it could be “someone else’s paintbrush” moving across his canvas, it moves so quickly. The experience of viewing his art is just as natural—like him, you are completely immersed in the environment you watch unfold.
Tricia Strickfaden’s work wraps up the show with an impressively wide-ranging selection of oil paintings. Works like her “Colors of California” series provides more abstract scenes, with thick, brisk strokes of color flying across canvases almost as quickly as the water they depict. Alternatively, “Golden Hues” presents a concrete, serene ocean display, carefully detailing the way the water and clouds play with the sun’s sunset rays. The diversity in her approaches comes from her strategy: Strickfaden “is constantly photographing images that inspire my work.”
As a result, each painting is a product not of her impression at its scene, but instead what she feels is needed to recreate its essence back in studio. It is there that she “can’t seem to stop” recreating the many ways she sees her world. The happy result? Viewers to the Creative Arts Center get to see it in many new and beautiful ways as well.
Three artists, three unique visions, and many open eyes. The breadth among each artist’s work, and especially between the artists themselves, lets “California Cruisin’” bring in something for everyone. Speaking at the end of the ceremonial remarks, Mayor David J. Lesser noted the power of “seeing so many different situations in our community drawn together” by the opening. On a larger scale, the ocean is what brought all of us to the South Bay in the first place. It then inspired each of these artists in a different way, and at “California Cruisin’”s opening it brought people from all over town together for discussion. This, as Lesser noted, is what we should applaud the artists for. “It reflects our community.”
California Crusin’ is on view through August 15 at the Creative Arts Center, 1560 Manhattan Beach Blvd., M.B. Hours, Tuesday and Thursday from 2 to 6 p.m., Wednesday from 4 to 8 p.m., and Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Call (310) 802-5440 or go to citymb.info.
