Yvette Gellis Brings Eye-Catching Mural to the Annenberg Community Beach House Walkway
April 20, 2021 12:55 PM
by Clove Galilee
Yvette Gellis has had a studio at 18th Street Art Center since 2008. It has beautiful light, high ceilings and her walls are filled with the oversized paintings that are her trademark. The studio has been such a blessing and an incubator for her process which runs the gambit from large paintings to installations to performance art.
Last December Yvette submitted a proposal to Santa Monica Cultural Affairs for the Out of the Blue program at the Annenberg Community Beach House. Out of the Blue is designed to offer the general public chance encounters with art and art-making at the Beach House. The Beach House was looking for an eye-catching mural with the intent to inspire well-being, recuperation, restoration, imagination, peacefulness, whimsy, and/or love of the natural world. The commission was to design a mural that would be installed all along the ocean-facing Beach House walkway.
Yvette’s painting, Sacred Spaces, does just that. An abstracted landscape that depicts a whole day view of the mountains and sea from dawn to dusk, Sacred Spaces reflects and refracts the beach and landscape the viewer is standing in.
In Yvette’s words, “In a year of intense negativity. The loss of my mother, a world pandemic, and all the geo-political events, I have chosen to focus on the positive, the beautiful, the harmonious aspects of nature where we all can agree and find love for one another and all of creation - especially our beautiful immediate environment as an immersive experience.”
When she paints, Yvette, enters the painting. She wanders the paths and follows the map of her imagination, exploring the landscape she is creating in real time. “My hope is that passersby will come across this art work on their daily jog or as they stroll by the water and be drawn into the work as I am when I create it. I want them to linger in the landscape a bit and experience the restorative power of art.”
Sacred Spaces will be available to view through Summer 2021. For more information, visit santamonica.gov/beachculture.
Authored By
Clove Galilee
Cultural Affairs Supervisor