Christopher Noxon will be showing in a two-person exhibit along with his late grandmother at the Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara. The show titled “From One Generation to the Next” runs through May 22, 2023.
She was born in Washington, D.C. in 1907 to a military family of high standing. He was born in L.A. in 1968 to a Hollywood family of note. East Coast, West Coast. Modern, Contemporary. Grandmother, grandson. Betty, an artist first and foremost, but a diarist, too. Christopher, a writer first, but then an illustrator and now a painter. From one generation to the next, the world changed a great deal, but the creative drive pulsing within the family genes and culture asserted itself again and again.
Showing together for the first time, Christopher and Betty share just a few stylistic preferences: the merging of graphic clarity with painterly passages, for example. Both grandmother and grandson seem determined to find patterns, whether natural or invented. The landscape is recurrent, though hers are often upstate New York, southern Canada, and Cape Cod, while Christopher largely paints his new surroundings in Ojai, CA. Otherwise, they are artists of a different stripe. For both, however, it seems to be enough to look and to paint. Thoughts and feelings have to sneak in. They focus on the visuals
