Golden light
Last Light Over Montecito, oil, 24 x 36.
California artists often have the luxury of a climate, community, and historical context that support their professional and personal lifestyles. Wyllis Heaton is well-acquainted with those benefits, having made a comfortable home and living as a painter in the Golden State for decades. Working in a lively colorist tradition that incorporates both traditional and contemporary impressionism, Heaton creates landscapes and still lifes that sing with a vibrant joie de vivre and are becoming increasingly popular among collectors.
Growing up in Pasadena, Heaton was influenced by many of the early California Impressionists, as well as by the illustrator William Stout, who lived two doors down from him. Stout gave the budding painter invaluable art lessons as well as access to an archive of rare art-history and design books. Like many great California artists, Heaton went on to earn a degree at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he studied with several reputable teachers of fine art, illustration, and design.
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- Wyllis Heaton, The Duomo, oil, 8 x 12.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Last Light in the Bay, gouache, 4 x 6.
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- Wyllis Heaton, The Arroyo Seco, gouache, 4 x 6.
Today Heaton’s passion is chasing paintable subjects in which he finds beauty, mystery, hope, and even decay, be it in California or in foreign lands. “These elements are everywhere, if you look hard enough, but I don’t mind traveling to great spots in Down East Maine, Northern Italy, China, Morocco, and the Southwestern and Mexican desert, where you can find them together in abundance,” he says.
The artist creates loose plein-air sketches in oil on canvas and also makes 4-by-6-inch paintings in gouache on heavy paper or card stock, using a bamboo brush and a slower, more precise approach. His larger studio works, often created from a successful gouache reference sketches, are painted in oil.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Into the Valley, oil, 24 x 36.
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- Wyllis Heaton, The Schooner Fleet, oil, 24 x 36.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Osiris Temple, oil, 6 x 8.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Red Flag, San Marco, oil, 9 x 12.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Mary Day, oil, 8 x 16.
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- Wyllis Heaton, Casa Display, oil, 24 x 24.
Heaton’s eye for composition is put to good use not only as a plein-air and studio painter but also in his complementary profession as a landscape designer in Santa Barbara. Working daily with the design and installation of gardens and water features, the artist pulls a great deal of inspiration for his paintings from the striking patterns, golden light, and transcendent color that surround him.
–Allison Malafronte
representation
Waterhouse Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA.
This story appeared in the May 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.