The Channel Islands, about 25 miles off the coast of Malibu and Santa Barbara, are a naturalist’s dream. The isolation of the islands’ lush hillsides, underwater caves and sandy coves has resulted in animal and plant species found nowhere else in the world. To conserve or restore the archipelago’s natural state, access is limited and overnight visitors must be willing to camp without any amenities or live aboard a boat, so seeing all the wonders there takes time and determination. But the stunning ecosystem has been brought ashore by California artist David Gallup, who spent six years painting an ode to its wilderness and marine life in a series of more than 70 Impressionistic oils now on exhibit at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. The setting for the art show seems apt, atop a hill looking down on the deep greens and blues of the Pacific, with the faint outline of Santa Cruz Island visible in the distance. Gallup paints in the plein-air tradition, working outdoors to sketch a scene and then using a series of those studies to create a finished painting in his Camarillo studio, a method said to best capture natural light. But like the wildlife that surrounded him on the islands, the painter was forced to adapt and evolve according to his environment. Setting a canvas on an easel was tricky in the gusty prevailing winds (though Gallup tells a story of painting with an umbrella over his canvas, his own head happily bare to the rain). The artist, near obsessed with the beauty of the environment, tried to paint as close to his subject as possible. He hiked 15 miles and more during day trips to explore the islands, often allowing his ranger guide to add miles of multiple detours. He learned to scuba dive a year ago just to explore the area’s marine life. One day he set up his easel on the deck of a dive boat, planning to grab his paintbrush immediately on surfacing’not surprisingly, the plan didn’t work well (it’s hard to imagine what the dive captain thought). This passionate focus has certainly paid off. From the small field studies gathered on one wall of the Pepperdine exhibit to the large canvases of underwater scenes that dominate the space opposite, Gallup’s works capture his experiences, picking up the nuances of light as it appears in nature. Whether skittering and bouncing off the surface of the ocean, piercing the water in an aurora of color that illuminates kelp and sea lions below, or falling faintly against a shroud of fog, the light is rendered in all its raw subtlety. ’All of his paintings are about luminosity,’ says Michael Zakian, Ph.D., the museum’s director. ‘His ability to capture the subtleties of light is intimately linked to his mastery of color.’ Gallup first traveled to the Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary (which includes five of the eight islands in the chain) in 2005 with a group of scientists and artists. He and his fellow artists were given special access for a year, to create work in celebration of the park’s 25th anniversary. What Gallup found was a ‘lifetime of inspiration’ that prompted him to doggedly petition the National Park Service for an extension of his special status (he finally won extended access after two years). Many areas of the islands, like breeding grounds or rookeries, are off-limits even to park rangers, but Gallup has had the opportunity to see dozens of dolphins and sea lions, and as many as 30 humpback whales at one time. He’s been able to study the island fox, whose only home is on the islands. He once nearly stepped on a sleeping 2,000-pound elephant seal (which had an extraordinary resemblance to nearby boulders). Gallup typically works to translate these phenomena without the benefit of photo references. ‘I don’t even take a camera with me at this point,’ he says. ‘I just go and explore and experience a particular place.’ The artist was trained as an illustrator and, early in his career, took a job copying photographs for the fine-art market, but he’s had his fill of that work. ‘I’m willing to tolerate certain inaccuracies,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to see the little tells of a photo reference. ’We see a lot more like a movie camera sees than we do like a still camera sees,’ Gallup explains. For one thing, ‘we don’t take everything in in one shutter click. As I’m painting, I’m not trying to freeze the time. I’m giving you little spots to look at that are in focus and I’m giving you large areas that are out of focus and feel like they’re being witnessed with peripheral vision. Working a lot with the directional quality of brushwork to give a sense of motion. I do a lot of little things to open up that window of time, that shutter click as it were, and try and make it 20 seconds if I can, or something much longer.’ ’Rhythm of Life,’ a study of two sea lions off Anacapa, is the result of a long, shallow dive in about 20 feet of water that allowed Gallup to stay in roughly one spot for quite a while, so ‘the geography of that is actually pretty close to what I saw there.’ But in many cases, Gallup says, ‘It’s almost like being an abstract painter, where you’re working a lot from intuition and imagination.’ ’Island Foxes and Willets’ sprung almost entirely from his mind’s eye. During one beach walk, Gallup noticed fox prints in the sand and followed them for about half a mile, hoping for an encounter, but instead found a jumble of prints where the two animals had stopped to leap, roll and play in the sand. ’The idea of these Channel Island foxes frolicking on the beach, sending the timid shorebirds rushing for the sky in alarm, sat in my mind for years,’ Gallup says. ‘Finally, being fully incubated, the vision hatched and made its way to canvas.’ It’s also an example of an entirely unintended evolution. ’I’ve become kind of a wildlife artist,’ Gallup says. ‘It surprised me a bit because I hate wildlife art. It all tends to look like copies of photos.’ But animals began sneaking into his work even before his exploration of the Channel Islands’a bird here, a cat or dog there, even cattle’without Gallup taking much note, and now wildlife animates many of the pieces in the museum show. He has long been interested in the environment; in college, he helped support himself by writing a newspaper column called ‘Earth Matters,’ and he discusses ecology just as enthusiastically as he does art. He notes that the last of the elk and deer put on Santa Rosa Island to be hunted were removed just this year, part of an effort to restore the natural habitat. Species not endemic to the island can kill off other species. Sheep brought over by ranchers, for example, dropped seeds of non-native grasses from their coats. ’You change one kind of grass that’s growing there and the whole ecosystem can go sideways,’ Gallup notes. He’s busy painting new pieces for a show he plans to mount two years from now. ’It’s been a spectacular adventure. I’m not ready for it to end.’ Gallup’s exhibit runs through July 31, Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Contact: (310) 506-4851 or arts.pepperdine.edu.
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