Art Ltd.excerpt from:
Mar 2010
"Another California painter who has found a convincing muse in the state's fires is Santa Barbara painter Nicole Strasburg. Santa Barbara, of course, has suffered its own terrible fires in recent years, including two significant fires in 2008, the Gap Fire, in July, in Goleta, which burned over 8,350 acres, and the Montecito Tea Fire, which burned nearly 2,000 acres in November, tearing through some very pricey real estate and destroying 210 homes. Strasburg, who works out of the more staid tradition of landscape painting, locates the fires within the range of elemental forces inherent to nature. Thus, her autumn 2009 show at Sullivan Goss Gallery, entitled "Air, Earth, Fire, Water," placed her fire paintings among a larger series of works featuring imagery of clouds and waves. In some paintings, the licking flames of fire suggest golden fields of grass, curls of dried brush, or the dynamism of ocean waves. In others, they are ferocious masses of orange and yellow, made all the more dramatic by their contrast to dark backgrounds, or the artist's vigorous brushstrokes. In several of these works, such as Gap Fire, Day One or Omen, the fire in indicated only by its ominous plumes of smoke. As destructive as they are, her fires represent a dynamic transformative energy that is as much as a part of nature as the vegetation they feed on, or the water, clouds and earth that frame them." from Art Ltd. Magazine Mar/Apr issue
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