Pastorals and Matilijas: Opening Reception
This Saturday, April 26, 2025, 11 am-5 pm
Pastorals and Matilijas
A group exhibition of botanical paintings, presented as part of the multimedia art event Here It Comes
Saturday, April 26, 2025, 11 am-5 pm
The Guild Studios
11505 Jefferson Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230
Featuring paintings by Wendy Bain, Laura Cerón, Denise Dejean, Jen Eldridge, Julie Grist, Darlene Hodgetts, Sarah Jennings, Lois Keller, Deanna Lau-Ino, Chloé Nelson, Julio Panisel,lo-Huguet, Claire Partin, Karen Rohlin, Jackie Vresics Sanders, Charlotte Tarantola, Jennifer Wheelock.
Exhibition Statement
Pastorals and Matilijas brings together two traditional painting genres reimagined in contemporary terms: mythic landscapes and floral subjects as seasonal rituals, both viewed through the lens of our observational, painter-led practice. Installed within Here It Comes, a multimedia art event, this exhibition marks the eighth anniversary of Roofless Painters, offering a moment to reflect, reconnect, and reimagine.
The pastoral paintings we created for this show are reinterpretations of a genre steeped in myth and control: pastoralism as a frame for idealized nature, composed serenity, and colonial gaze. Our starting point was Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, a 1998 exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The show examined how artists from the 17th to 19th centuries constructed imagined visions of rural life.
The subject became a response to the devastation caused by the fires that swept through parts of Los Angeles in January on 2025. Images of entire landscapes and neighborhoods reduced to ash left an imprint on our collective psyche. In turning to pastoralism, we sought to engage in restoration: to use painting as a counterpoint to loss, and as a way to reimagine a landscape not as decimated, but held, idealized, and made whole again in the act of depiction.
The adjacent Matilija wall features a salon-style installation of poppy paintings created over multiple springs, all painted from life in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Matilija poppy, Romneya coulteri, is native to Southern California and holds deep resonance in Chumash mythology, where it is said to symbolize both death and rebirth: floral presence at the site of spirit transitions. Painting Matilijas in their natural habitat and blooming season has become a yearly tradition: a ritual of witness, a way of tracking ecosystems. This wall will grow throughout the Matilija's blooming season as we go out and paint this year’s flowers from life during the exhibition, adding them to the pictorial arrangement and forming an expanding bouquet that mirrors the unfolding of spring just outside these walls.
Together, Pastorals and Matilijas holds space for historical reference and seasonal return, collective memory and intimate study, celebrating what happens when painting becomes a practice of shared presence across time.
About Roofless Painters
Roofless Painters is an itinerant, Los Angeles-based painting school and collective. Founded in 2017, it hosts location-based painting sessions, exhibitions, and thematic projects rooted in art history, somatic awareness, and contemporary ecology. The group has presented work in galleries, public spaces, and domestic sites, always guided by its core ethos: painting as a ritual of attention.
For more information, visit www.rooflesspainters.com.
Will the space be open for visiting on Friday May 2?