The Oak Group, a seasoned landscape painter coalition with a mission, is currently enjoying the generous institutional embrace of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, in one of its stronger and more self-defining showings of recent years. The show takes its title, The Grace of the World, from a fitting Wendell Berry quote: “I come into the peace of wild things … rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Wild things — more specifically: wild, natural spaces — are central to the manifesto of the Oak Group. For nearly four decades in the trenches and the fields, the group has been dedicated to creating a growing body of sensitive plein air paintings, primarily focusing on the rich and as-yet-developed spaces in Santa Barbara County and the Channel Islands. This current sampling of the group’s art becomes an affirmation of a long-held passion, as well as a ripe primer on the Oak Group, for viewers new to the phenom.

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“Evening of Communion, Rincon Bluffs” by Arturo Tello | Photo: Courtesy

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One of the group’s founders and distinctive painters is Arturo Tello, who also runs the Palm Loft gallery in Carpinteria, a common source of his painting settings. His statement in the museum speaks volumes about the Oak Group’s philosophical mandate: “A landscape painting is a celebration of beauty, a prayer of gratitude for open spaces, and the path to intimacy with Nature. I see the role of the landscape painter not as a dreamer, but as an active defender of the land.”

Tello’s touch is seen here in the long, willfully horizontal view of idyllic Carpinteria land and sea, “Evening of Communion, Rincon Bluffs.”

Another founder is the late, great guru-like figure Ray Strong, a lifelong devotee of plein air paintings whose work can also be seen in the tableaux scenes in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Strong’s inspired touch is exemplified in the canvas “Harvest Fields, Santa Ynez Valley,” a composition awash in undulant waves of golden fields.

Visions of nature and impassioned art about nature have blithely invaded the Westmont museum at the moment, starting at the starting point. The entryway gallery features such intriguing, time- and light-sensitive canvases — invoking recognizable artistic “voices” as Michael Drury’s dramatic cliffside vista “Winter Afternoon, Point Conception,” and Marcia Burtt’s “Late Sun, Footpath Near Los Padres.” Burtt’s painting implies a sense of procession, from a shaded leafy terrain into the light-basted hill beyond, leading the eye down a path to the forest in the distance.

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“Late Sun, Footpath into Los Padres” by Marcia Burtt | Photo: Courtesy

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For her part, Kerri Hedden leans into the green and moisture-laden ground in “Spring Rain,” with elegant painterly style. Whitney Brooks Abbott, whose work has often featured rustic, luminous interiors and rusty pickup trucks on her family’s Carpinteria property, heads more fully into the natural realm with her impressive canvas “South-Moving Cloud over North Campus,” energized by her loose-brushed, micro-rhythmic approach.

While the lion’s share of Oak Group paintings sidestep manmade structures or objects, there are compatible outliers in the show. Hank Pitcher, who has painted many a landscape and beachscape for decades, shows one of his surfboard portraits, “Eric’s Board at Sands Beach II,” looming vertically in an almost figurative way. But the board/figure surrogate appears slightly detached from the fuzzy beach scene background in the painting, as if levitating in our faces.

Seasoned and artful aerial photographer Bill Dewey supplies his own particular vantage on the landscape far below, in this case with a striking black-and-white image “Los Padres Front Country Clouds 3-20-2024.” The title conveys a truth, and a conceit: the front country is the occluded background of a bank of pillowy clouds as an equally important subject.

John Wullbrandt’s “Barn at Sedgwick Reserve” captures, with a precise eye and hand and a certain wistful gaze, a structure on this mythic ranch property in the Santa Ynez Valley. Wullbrandt’s painting represents a view of lesser-known or less easily accessed natural zones in our midst, a seeking-out agenda that is also part of the Oak Group scope. Sarah Vedder deploys her characteristic soft-focus approach with “Afternoon on Jalama Road,” a personal variation on the post-impressionist mode and a dreamy scene with tractor and barn structures tucked into the rolling hill forms.

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“Rolling Hills” by Larry Iwerks | Photo: Courtesy

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Chris Chapman soaks up the precious coastal zone just north of Goleta, “Dos Pueblos Canyon,” while her husband, Larry Iwerks, nuzzles up against an essence of abstraction in “Rolling Hills,” in which the title tells basic story and setting but the rugged visual lines and diagonal dynamics veer into the stuff of non-representational optics.

Suffice to say, the Oak Groupers are artists with a strong commonality and commitment and to the stated conservationist visions of the collective. But, true to the nature of personal artistic perspectives, each individual brings his/her own voice to the table. Differences, even subtle ones, add to the vitality of the totality. Nature wins out, at least here.

The Grace of the World is on view through December 21 at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art (955 La Paz Rd.). The museum is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. on Saturdays. It is closed on Sundays and college holidays. For more information, please call (805) 565-6162 or see westmont.edu/museum.