One-Woman Show Opens at Santa Ysabel Art Gallery

Whenever Margaret Larlham drives from San Diego to Santa Ysabel, she is aware of the surroundings and what might become a subject for one of her landscape paintings.

“On the way to Santa Ysabel by Witch Creek, I keep looking around the whole road for things that call out,” she said.

Larlham specializes in rural landscapes in her plein air paintings. She works in pastels and oils. A new exhibit of her work—“Margaret Larlham, New Paintings"—is currently on display at Santa Ysabel Art Gallery.

Larlham paints nearly every day in her studio or on location in Mission Trails Park near her home or in the backcountry around Santa Ysabel.

“Santa Ysabel has become a special place for me,” she said. “Because I exhibit there, I’ve been interested in doing some of the plein air work there as well.”

The artist is particularly fond of a large painting in the exhibit she calls “California Oak on a Cliff,” painted on location in the Witch Creek area.

Many paintings in the exhibit are scenes from Mission Trails Park near her home in Tierrasanta in San Diego. The park reminds her of the landscape in her native South Africa.

Her one-woman show includes paintings she did last year while on a trip to deliver books to a school in Kongwa, Tanzania. Her husband, Peter Larlham, attended elementary school there in the 1950s and is now heading a book drive for the school, which serves 800 students in a remote area 10 hours from the nearest city.

The Larlhams are both professors at San Diego State University. Margaret is in the School of Theatre, Television and Film, and Peter is in the Theater Arts department. A group of SDSU students accompanied the couple to Tanzania. While they worked on the book project, the artist went off in search of places to set up her easel. When she did, a group of youngsters were soon watching her every stroke and expressed an interest in drawing.

“It was a different encounter with the children,” she said. “They almost became my apprentices. It was really quite an enchanting time.”

Larlham also is an artist-in-residence for San Diego Unified School District. She has been exhibiting her art in San Diego since the early 1990s and at the Santa Ysabel Gallery for 10 years.

Larlham’s show will continue through Feb. 13. Santa Ysabel Art Gallery is open from 11 am. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Monday and at other times by appointment. The gallery is located at 30352 state Route 78, Santa Ysabel. Admission is free. For more information, call 760-765-1676.