Santa Cruz has been an outdoor painting hotspot since the 1890’s, well-known across the nation as a destination for exploring art while surrounded by nature. In fact, the Seabright Community in particular has been an artistic hub for plein air painters for over a hundred years and continues to have a robust presence even today.
Join Kathleen Aston, the Museum’s Collections Manager, as she opens the vault to spotlight rare art from the Museum’s historic archives and Taylor Seamount, a local plein air artist trailblazing the contemporary nature painting movement. You won’t want to miss experiencing this living timeline of Santa Cruz’s art scene.
📆 Wednesday, March 26th
⏱️ 6 – 8 p.m.
📍 Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
1305 East Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95062
Light refreshments will be served prior to the start of the program.
Class Fee: $11 – Museum Members receive a special discounted price applied at checkout.
Instructor: Kathleen Aston, Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, & Taylor Seamount, local artist/activist/instructor
About the Instructors
Kathleen Aston, Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
As Collections Manager, Kathleen Aston is responsible for the physical and intellectual organization and preservation of the Museum’s collections. She joined the museum’s staff as collections specialist in 2017, and holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Reed College and a Master’s of Library and Information Science from the University of Washington. Kathleen is fascinated by the informational life of collections and how they anchor people to an understanding of the natural world. Her other interests include coffee, stargazing, weird plants, animals that look like blobs, and the repair and reuse sections of the waste management cycle.
Website: taylorseamount.com
Instagram: @taylorseamount
Taylor Seamount, local artist/activist/instructor
Growing up in the natural beauty of Santa Cruz, CA, Taylor was set on a winding path between science and art. She received her bachelors in biochemistry at UC Davis and later spent two years at the Mark Kang-O’Higgins Modern Painting Atelier in Seattle. After the atelier, Taylor moved back home to Santa Cruz due to a worsening of her invisible disability, POTS. Adapting to her new limitations, Taylor’s artistic practice refocused from large imaginative realist oil paintings to small works in gouache. She came to aspire to the visionary landscape styles of gouache illustrators, James Gurney (Dinotopia) and Kazuo Oga (Studio Ghibli), and accordingly began to study natural color and light through plein air (i.e. painting landscapes on location outdoors). As plein air became central to her creative practice, she developed a distinctive crisp flat-brush style. Additionally, she began a successful business designing and selling her own unique ultra-light-weight plein air sketch easels, fabricated here in Santa Cruz. As a UC Certified California Naturalist and climate justice artivist, Taylor uses plein air and solar punk illustration to envision a regenerative future for her community. In this work, she often collaborates with local activists and environmental stewards. Hobbies not yet incorporated into her work are napping and saying hi to the native plants that are walking distance from her house. Her pronouns are both they/them and she/her.