Sullivan Goss will host a solo exhibit by Santa Barbara’s reknowned plein air artist Merideth Brooks Abbott. The exhibit, titled Capturing Our Time, will include paintings from the 1990s to the present. Brooks Abbott will be present at the 1st Thursday reception, May 7.

In celebration of Brooks Abbott’s enduring legacy, the display will be accompanied by “Enduring Impressions,” a new hardbound monograph, surveying six decades of painting by Brooks Abbot. A small number of advanced copies will be available for sale at the opening, organizers said.

Brooks Abbott (b. 1938) was one of five born in her family in Carpinteria, four of whom became artists. As a teenager, she studied with painters like Richard Meryman, Douglass Parshall, and Clarence Hinkle, making her a living link to the first generation of California impressionist painters.

She and her husband Duncan also own a farm in Carpinteria, where she grows some of what she paints.

In 1986, she was one of the founding members of the OAK Group, an artist collaborative that has painted the landscape for preservation.

Brooks Abbott has shown with many of Santa Barbara’s most respected and long-lived art galleries and has sold some 1,500 paintings to a collector base numbering in the hundreds.

Her work celebrates the produce, the flowers, the architecture, and especially, the landscape of Santa Barbara County.

Both her daughter Whitney Brooks Abbott and her late sister Whitney Brooks Hansen were also OAK Group members, making their family one of the true dynastic art families of Southern California.