A mostly self-educated artist with an international career, Irma Cavat’s focus on the creation of often amusing, occasionally disquieting images spanned more than seven decades. Legacy Art Santa Barbara Gallery owner Crispin Barrymore and director Laela Duncan offered my family a rare opportunity to display my mother’s art for three glorious months. The first impression upon walking into this dizzying collection is simply awe. Paintings glitter, sway, and luxuriate in gentle pools of light. Watercolors of upstate New York, the French countryside, and elsewhere offer portals into other worlds. A Picasso-esque pillow of canvas and black velvet peeks at you from a windowsill.
After more than a decade of living primarily in Italy, Irma moved to Santa Barbara with my sister Karina and me in 1963. She eventually became a fully tenured Professor of Art at UCSB, and it is here in our lovely seaside town that she created a breath-takingly diverse body of work. She used to say that the light here was identical to the light that shone on the ochre roofs of Rome, a light that drew her back to the easel repeatedly.
Born on November 23, 1925, in Brooklyn, my mother became part of the Abstract Expressionist group of artists when she was a younger artist living in New York City in the 1950s. She hung out with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, and Larry Rivers, amongst others. They shared meals, swapped ideas, and supported one another through lean and prosperous times.
Although she went on to create her own distinct style, Irma retained not only those friendships, but also the ethos of deep inquiry into the process of creating art. As you walk about the gallery, you may ask yourself how one person — a single woman raising children on her own while balancing a full-time career — could have possibly produced all this exquisite work. I want to underscore that it is not only the volume, but also the quality that so impresses.
She learned almost straight out of high school from Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko how to work with clay, metal and wood. She snuck into veterinary school anatomy classes and practiced how to draw animals’ muscles and skeletons. After falling in love with Haitian music, Irma hopped a steam ship bound for Haiti and lived there for a year, trading portraits of villagers for room and board. She pursued adventure and creative inspiration in equal measure. Just as her mind was never still, neither were her hands.
My mother eschewed labels, so identifying her as a feminist, per se, feels too restrictive. Awareness of her creative courage preceded my understanding of what this meant for a woman daring to work in a male-dominated field. Irma also came of age well before digital technology. While she obsessively mined magazines, newspapers, and books for inspiration, what she loved best were still life set-ups of fruits, flowers, and everyday objects. We brought her baskets full of avocados, pomegranates, and oranges, and like a chef would make meals of homegrown produce she turned them into paintings.
Our circle of friends included classical composers, novelists, costume designers, nuclear physicists, and others from around the world. Inevitably, the conversation moved from the dinner table to the studio where Irma might start to show off her latest painting, and then wind up tweaking it while continuing to converse. She was a strongly opinionated woman, and to challenge her world view may have meant reconsidering one’s own. Long after guests left, she returned to that studio to continue working alone as the moon shone brightly across the orchard and onto her easel. The light under her studio door often stayed on all night long. Despite the long hours, if a peach or a vase of water wasn’t cooperating, she’d just paint over it without a moment’s hesitation.
The Legacy Art retrospective, which runs through September, has required not only preparing the works for exhibition, but allowing myself to vividly relive the periods in which my mother followed her passions. The French Impressionist 3D sculptural period. The sepia-toned figures period. The Free Love, Hippy ’60s era. And so on to the more austere and studied period of still-life artworks that resonate and beguile the viewer. Most of all, the show generously invites people to entertain their own potential for creativity as they discover that art is truly for everyone and anyone with a desire for beauty, contemplation, and kinship.
A reception for “Still Light: Irma Cavat Art Retrospective” takes place Friday, July 19, 5-8 p.m. at Legacy Art Santa Barbara, where Nika Cavat will speak about her mother’s career (1230 State St.).
