August 5th. 2024
Brian Drkae before Santa Barbara event
I have been busy in 2024. As summer moves along, pieces are starting to come back from shows and I am contemplating what’s next for the fall season. Currently, there are only 2 paintings on display, both located inside the Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, in Maryland. They are the marquee wall at the “Pop! Art for The Masses” exhibition. They have been well received and will come down the first week of October. I will write more on this show for a future post. For now, I have been concentrating on in person events, on the west coast. Mostly in the Santa Barbara area. How I got here is the story.

Why Santa Barbara?
The wine. At least thats how it started. Sort of.

Really?
Let me back track a bit. At first, I was encouraged several years ago to reach out to Sullivan Goss, a Santa Barbara gallery, by my friend Michael Canon, who gave we a spot, in a group show, in Alhambra, back in 2019. In ’20/21 Michael became a fan of my brand new Broken Bank Note work and thought Sullivan Goss would be a good fit for me. After I sent a brief email introduction, Sullivan Goss’s people were kind enough to tell me to go pound sand. Whatever. The first series of paintings sold and time went by. I fell out of touch with Michael after my fathers death at the end of the pandemic. I had a lot going on. I need to fix that. Michael call me! I will do the same.

Okay, so…
2023 went by and I created more Broken Bank Note work for a second series. By January, 2024, I had a small collection of new work to present. At the same time, I had become a frequent visitor to Santa Barbara wine rooms. Years ago, I had a large wine collection stored in a commercial cellar. With out going into nonsense detail, I had a lot of wine at one point in my life. I sold all of it a long time ago and never looked back. In fact, I didn’t even drink for over 2 years. Some of you who know me from the past, probably just passed out reading that part. Anyways, in an attempt to find new reasons to be in Los Angeles, I started visiting wine country. Well… there you go. If you have ever been, you get it. And I love it. Especially central coast wines and Santa Barbara.

Whatever with the wine shit.
Right, however, during those visits, I started building art relationships. Michael’s words were in the back of my head the whole time. Thats how it all started. I did try to reach out to Sullivan Goss with the new work, but they never responded. I get it. However, I was looking to rent their facility for a pop up show. Not gallery representation. Maybe I should have started my email with that? I guess I buried the lead. In the end, I stared doing events and pop ups at private residences and odd commercial spaces.

Where is this going?
This post was intended to be a summer update. Instead it looks like a picture of what 10 pounds of weight gain from wine looks like, while sitting on a clown chair. Look. This is work. Save the sexy resorts for vacation time. However, In writing this post, I have decided that a greater point is, relationships outside traditional representation is the only way artist can survive. Moving forward I will be doing more in the region, especially as I build a client base. I want to be clear; it’s a tough journey. No body just showed up from their Montecito estate and exclaimed: “Wow! How can I buy your art?” That is not how it happens. Ever. However, if you show up, do presentations, get the work in front of the right people, you can foster patrons outside of the traditional, and let’s face it, dying, brick and mortar gallery world.

Michael was right. Santa Barbara needed my kind of work. I mean … how many fucking sea scapes and Missions can one take? But coastal cliché art is for another conversation.