Sonoma County artists Pamela Glasscock and Tony King are married, but they don’t share brushes. “We really make an effort to be independent,” King says. They paint in separate studios on their land high in the hills overlooking Freestone Valley.
So when both were featured in a recent Sonoma County Museum exhibit, it was a rare opportunity for collectors to see their work together. The mixed-media show, Botany 12, featured plant-inspired work from a dozen artists. “No one had done a show with Sonoma County artists in a comprehensive way, and this was our attempt to do so,” said curator Natasha Boas. “Pamela and Tony engage in very different artistic practices and yet they approach their work with the same intensity and scientific precision. ”
A Massachusetts native, King entered Stanford as a science and math student. But art courses, including a lithography class with his lifelong friend and mentor Nathan Oliveira, inspired him to change direction. After sophomore year, King studied drawing and painting for a year at the New York Studio School before returning to Stanford to compete his BS in math.
Glasscock, from Colorado, studied fine art, but she didn’t meet her future husband until 1974, after she moved to New York, where King had made his home. During the '70s and '80s, the couple pursued their careers in Manhattan—with King exploring conceptual and abstract work, and Glasscock focusing on landscape and still life in silverpoint, a Renaissance drawing technique. “There was a real community of artists in Soho and a wonderful sense of possibility,” King, 61, recalls.
The couple spent summers in California until 1992, when the family—by then with two sons—relocated permanently to Freestone.
With the move, King began painting vivid plein air landscapes. Glasscock shifted to painting flowers. “Practically all my models came from our garden and friends’ gardens,” she says. Her beguiling, meticulously rendered watercolors sometimes take several years to complete. In her studio, flowers in various stages—from tight new buds to overblown blossoms—sit in pots and bottles on her drawing table, like actors waiting to perform.
“My work is botanically accurate, but also metaphorical, an opportunity to make theatrical presentations using plant elements, as if I’m directing them on a stage.”
With their sons off at college, both painters find the focus of their work is changing again. “When you are painting plants, there are always new things to see. I’ve spent 25 years with roses and other garden flowers. Now I’m also working with orchids and natives,” says Glasscock, 54. King is working on a series of large-scale paintings of coastal images, depicting “the chaos at the edge of land and water.”
