Oil paintings by California painter Hank Pitcher titled “Water Gaze” will be on display until Feb. 13 in the New Media Gallery at Ventura College.

Through his involvement of the ocean, beach culture and vision of landscape, he captures the essence of place – the Central Coast.

“Hank Pitcher is a landscape painter focusing on the beach culture,” VC art Professor Sharon Coughran said. “He’s a surfer [and] spent a lot of time at the beach, from the foothills of Big Sur down to Point Conception, Santa Barbara, Ventura to San Diego.”

Pitcher was a football linebacker at San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, and was recruited by big universities, he said. But he didn’t see football in his future. “At a young age I just knew what I wanted to do,” he said.

He knew art was what he wanted to do. “I can’t do both,” he said. “Football is a physical challenge. Art is an intellectual challenge. There’s a future in art. You can’t play football all your life.”

Pitcher ended up at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Creative Studies Department and graduated in 1971.He also studied art in New York with other artists. And, he said, he continuously learns about art by reading and staying connected to people who are serious artists.

Coughran had encountered Pitcher’s work at UCSB, where she studied art. Pitcher was teaching painting in the Creative Studies Department there; he continues to teach there to this day.

Pitcher paints in “plain-air, in the open space outdoors,” Coughran said. Then, she said, “he may go back to finish up at his studio.”

Coughran invited Pitcher to present his new work at Ventura College. His paintings are of Southern California coastlines and landscapes that look recognizable.

“The paintings give a southern feeling,” said VC child development major Louis Moreno, 22, as he studied Pitcher’s works. “It feels like home. They are very peaceful and welcoming.

“This is my favorite of all paintings, ‘Ghost House of Point Conception,'” Moreno said. “I like the variety of greens. It looks realistic.”

Pitcher said he tries to “capture the moments.” He paints the life he is living. He expresses his love of the beach culture and the California lifestyle in his paintings.

Some of his favorite paintings were created on the winter solstice and on New Year’s Eve watching the last sunset of the year. “I believe in rituals,” he said.

For about the last 15 years, Pitcher has returned annually with his wife and two sons to a secret beach spot. It is a sense of place, where families and friends gather, children play volleyball, people watch the rush of the waves and the last sunset of the year.

The place is never changing, he said, but it is never the same. Pitcher captures the New Year’s Eve moments in his paintings and toasts to it.

Pitcher’s wife, Susan Pitcher, displays some of her husband’s surfboard paintings in her Montecito dress shop, called The Dressed. She described her husbands paintings as “the celebration of life, in this time and place, in the day and of this age.”

“It’s the dream of California,” she added.

VC art student Dahlia Riley, 60, looks at Hank Pitcher’s painting (Laurie Tuschka)

“Lifeguard at Ledbetter” is an oil painting on canvas over board. (Laurie Tuschka)