Rancho Santa Fe’s Oolong Gallery has launched a new residency program to promote local emerging artists, welcoming Carmel Valley painter John Notham as its inaugural inhabitant.
At Oolong, Notham will expand on his work “exploring California light, transitional architecture, coastal atmosphere, and figurative tableaux rooted in cinematic Americana.” An opening reception will be held Saturday, June 6 from 5-8 p.m. at the gallery.
“The residency will serve as both a studio laboratory and public-facing dialogue,” said Oolong Gallery’s owner Eric Laine in the program description. “This framework allows viewers insight into Notham’s evolving process as he further develops a painterly language situated between realism, memory, and psychological narrative.”
Notham splits time between his home and studio in Carmel Valley and his native Wisconsin at his family’s tree farm near Wild Rose/Wautoma, a landscape Laine observes remains “deeply embedded in the emotional and visual vocabulary of his work.”
Artist John Notham at the San Diego County Fair last year. (Courtesy John Notham)
According to his artist bio, Notham earned a degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, launching a successful 30-year professional career while painting on the side. Painting began as a refuge from the stress of corporate life, but has now become his full-time career. “Notham approaches each canvas with the sensitivity of someone reclaiming a lifelong vocation rather than discovering a new one,” writes Laine.
Throughout his residency, Notham’s landscapes and figurative paintings will be on display, work that draws heavily from the traditions of American realism and Impressionism.
“Whether depicting wooded paths, shoreline light, marinas, roadside architecture, or anonymous interiors, Notham is concerned with the structural behavior of light across painted space — how shadows fracture form, how muted chromatic transitions create emotional tension, and how fleeting environmental conditions can become psychologically charged through paint handling,” writes Laine.
“Breaking Away” by Carmel Valley artist John Notham. (Phillipp Scholz Rittermann)
This past fall, Oolong celebrated its first anniversary in the Rancho Santa Fe village. The gallery originally got its start in Solana Beach in 2022 and has hosted 35 exhibitions and six art fair presentations.
This spring, Laine announced the gallery’s expansion to Tribeca, New York, “marking a new chapter in the gallery’s commitment to influential exhibition-making across both coasts.” The new New York gallery space opened on May 15 with “GONGGONG”, a solo presentation by painter Adam Rabinowitz.
The Rancho Santa Fe gallery is open by appointment at 6030 La Flecha. For more details, visit oolongallery.com