There's something profound about returning to a place where you once belonged with work that didn't exist when you left.
Nine years. That's how long it's been since I've shown work in Santa Barbara, a city that was home during a short but meaningful chapter of my life. Now I'm back, not as the artist I was then, but as the artist I've become.
"Ode to the Sky" is hanging at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara as part of Arte del Pueblo, running through July 27.
The piece captures that moment when the day surrenders to evening, when the sky becomes a canvas of impossible colors that no amount of training prepares you to paint. It's the kind of light that stops you mid-conversation, that makes you pull over on the highway just to witness it.
There's also "Days Like These," which was accepted into Aquatic, a juried group show at the Santa Barbara Tennis Club Gallery. It runs June 6-29, and represents something entirely different—a crystalline moment of perfect clarity where turquoise water meets weathered rocks and scattered beachgoers exist in peaceful harmony. It's about those rare days when everything aligns: the light, the water, the sense that you're exactly where you need to be.
Looking at "Days Like These," you can almost feel the cool water against your skin, hear the gentle lapping against the rocks. There's something about the way the water pools in the protected cove, the way tiny figures dot the beach like punctuation marks in a love letter to leisure. It's hyperreal yet dreamlike, the kind of scene that makes you question whether you're looking at a memory or a wish.
What strikes me about both pieces is how they speak to different aspects of the Santa Barbara experience—the dramatic sky that performs nightly theater above and the intimate coastal moments that happen in protected coves where time seems to slow down. One piece reaches toward the infinite; the other celebrates the perfectly finite moment.
When I left nine years ago, I was still learning how to see. I was painting what I thought landscapes should look like rather than what they actually felt like. Now I understand the difference between documenting a place and capturing its essence, between painting a scene and painting a feeling.
These aren't just paintings of sky and water. They're paintings of longing, of the way certain places imprint themselves on your creative DNA. They're about the conversations between geography and memory, between the places we've been and the places we're becoming.
Arte del Pueblo—"Art of the People"—feels like the right context for this homecoming. There's something democratic about the way certain landscapes claim us all, regardless of how long we stay or where we go next. The Santa Barbara sky doesn't belong to anyone, which means it belongs to everyone. The same is true for those perfect cove days that exist in everyone's memory, even if the details are different.
I'm curious about something: How does it feel to encounter your own growth in familiar surroundings? To see your evolution reflected back through institutions and spaces that knew you when you were still figuring it all out?
There's vulnerability in returning. You can't hide behind the safety of distance or the excuse of time. The work either stands on its own merit or it doesn't. The artist you've become either justifies the journey or reveals how far you still have to go.
But there's also profound satisfaction in offering something back to a place that gave you so much. Santa Barbara didn't just provide beautiful scenes to paint—it taught me how to be present with beauty, how to stop and witness instead of rushing past.
These exhibitions feel like a full-circle moment, but not in the way people usually mean that phrase. It's not about returning to where I started. It's about bringing forward what I've learned, about letting the work speak for itself in a language I couldn't access nine years ago.
To my Santa Barbara friends and family: if you happen to visit either show, please snap a pic for me. Not just of the work, but of how it feels to see it hanging there. Sometimes the artist is the last person to know whether they've managed to capture what they were reaching for.
Because ultimately, that's what all art is—reaching. Reaching toward beauty, toward understanding, toward connection. Reaching toward the light we remember, the perfect days that shaped us, the places that continue to paint themselves new in our memory.
Stefanie Bales is an award-winning fine artist, muralist, and owner of Stefanie Bales Fine Art—San Diego's "Best Art Gallery" three years running. After earning her MFA and spending over a decade as an art professor, she now paints full-time from her downtown gallery, creating the kind of surreal dreamscapes that make people stop and wonder if they're looking at the future or remembering a dream. When she's not collaborating with brands like Societea or preparing for her upcoming TEDx talk, she's raising two sons who remind her daily that the best art happens when you're not trying to make art at all. Learn more at stefaniebales.com
