The Easton Gallery: A Profile
The Easton Gallery is housed in Ellen Easton's quiet and incredibly charming Montecito home on an unassuming lane off Hot Springs Road. You enter the home through her charming garden, stepping into a gallery with fantastic local art. Ellen, who founded the gallery twenty years ago, was raised in Santa Barbara. After a stint in the Bay Area, she settled back in here with her family and turned her passion for art into a profession.
The Easton Gallery has published three incredible books, two of which pertain to Santa Barbara County and we couldn't be more pleased to offer them here on our website.
The gallery's books began as a collaboration between artists, historians and the Easton Gallery. The first project set out to paint Santa Barbara county's historic ranches. The result is Ranchos, filled with the incredibly beautiful paintings created for the project, including adobes and vast landscapes as well as pencil drawings and rich historical text. Ranchos is a mighty book.
Gardens, the second book from The Easton Gallery captures some of Santa Barbara's most incredible gardens, from grand estates and government buildings to humble backyards. In the foreword, Ellen Easton puts it thus:
With the images for this book, the artists have tried to capture the emotional elements of the gardens as well as the landscape details. If you look carefully at this collection of paintings you will be able to experience the same things the artists did - the coolness of an evening, the sound of a fountain, the late light on the mountains. May your personal vision be enriched by these memorable paintings of Santa Barbara's most notable gardens (page 12).
Gardens of Santa Barbara weaves Santa Barbara history and the changing way in which we have thought about our outdoor spaces together. The paintings and sketches created for the project appear on nearly every page with anecdotes, history and rich analysis alongside them . At the end of the book is a 63 page gallery of the artwork that resulted from the collaboration.
In the twenty-three years since the Easton Gallery came into being, its contribution to the Santa Barbara art community has been great. Ranchos and Gardens and the collaboration between artist, gallery and historian that spawned them document great and modest Santa Barbara places in a truly novel way. These two books heighten our appreciation and admiration of The Easton Gallery and our incredible Santa Barbara community.
