Fernand Harvey Lungren was among Santa Barbara’s most distinguished artists of the early twentieth century. Although he began his career as part of the circle of the American artist William Merritt Chase and spent an extended period in Paris where he was influenced by the work of James McNeill Whistler, it was Lungren’s journey to the American Southwest that most profoundly affected him. Sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad which wished to commission images of the Southwest to entice eastern tourists, Lungren made his first excursions west in the early 1890s. By the 1920s, Lungren’s Santa Barbara studio became a center for the local arts scene where the artist displayed his Native American artifacts alongside canvases depicting the glowing, solitary beauty of the American desert.
It was Lungren’s intent that his collections be given to “people of the City of Santa Barbara” for public enjoyment and edification. In his will, the artist bequeathed his painting collection, a body of 188 paintings and 131 drawings, to the Santa Barbara Teachers’ College, the forerunner to the UC Santa Barbara, and his collection of Native American artifacts to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. It was Lungren’s wish that the gift of his collection “will result in as much pleasure to the community as I have in making it.”
Like the landscapes she designs, Isabelle Greene is an amalgamation of equally important influences: the Arroyo Seco landscapes of her youth, the design heritage of her grandfather Henry Mather Greene and grand-uncle Charles Sumner Greene, her education and early career as a botanist and illustrator, and finally her designs as a landscape architect. Similarly, Greene’s gardens fuse her clients’ tastes, inspired engineering, the surrounding environment, and a keen sense of the immutable qualities of nature itself.
“Designing a garden is all about movement,” explains Isabelle. “Never does a garden arrive — it is forever becoming. Time is the factor which renders to the garden its special character. There are also weighty elements: craggy, eternal things like rocks; earthy things like tractors, imponderable things like ‘regulatory bodies’... And there are also the gossamer, unpredictable overlays: frost, reflections, shadows, dews. The interplay among these different spectrums provides a garden’s intense richness.”
Isabelle nurtures a particular passion for southern California landscapes, originally engendered by family camping trips when she was a child. Her respect for the lay of the natural landscape informs even her most highly crafted designs — if there is no water element, she might, for example, create a ‘stream’ of flagstones to punctuate the contours or lead the eye subconsciously from one space to another. Textures, as well as shapes and colors, inspire her designs, and found objects often become part of her palette as well.
An artist of nature, Isabelle has an almost mystical connection to her work. “Final outcomes,” she notes,” are a glimpse into meanings far beneath the surface and far beyond our consciousness. They let the visitor in on secrets that are so satisfying, they needn’t even be comprehended.”