ART 26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 18-24, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Looking for color? The Marjorie Evans Gallery at Sunset Center has a wonderfully appealing exhibit on display, showcasing decades of work by artist couple Carol Chapman and Fred Slautterback. She is a trained artist, known for her beach-themed serigraphs, portraits, sculptures and abstract work; he is known for his work with a pigmented plastic called Touleen, a self-taught explorer of many artistic forms, oscillating between industry and fine art. “Carol and Fred applied individually to be shown at the gallery,” says Elana Kline-Thompson, the community engagement manager at Sunset Cultural Center, who is responsible for programming at the Marjorie Evans Gallery. “But their work is in such dialogue. The title of the exhibit—A Colorful Couple—is theirs.” The gallery space is fairly divided. Chapman and Slautterback each have a corridor for themselves and share a hallway. The amount of mediums and shapes surprises, the variety of the work presented defies expectations. But everything is faithful to their shared religion of color, employed to energize or to soothe the senses. Chapman’s serigraphs are an ode to a perfect vacation by the water, with their folding beach chairs (linen and wood), forgotten beach scarfs, pool skimmer nets and shadows of morning and sunset. Her oil landscapes are Scandinavian in their aesthetic of clean lines and almost puritanical symmetry; the more playful seem her big cutouts—of a boat or sunglasses, in which we can see summer in Carmel. In Slautterback’s section, mediums and materials compete in the battle for a perfect balance. There is enamel on paper, acrylic on wood, Touleen on plexiglass, watercolors, mixed-media and his newest explorations in art-weaving. Texture is the name of the game, with subject matter for the most part abstract, be it the mood (“Serenity”) or a location (“Big Sur,” “Guatemala”). There’s one piece on display Chapman and Slautterback created together, a low stool covered with lovely deep green Touleen that coats objects thickly—a candy-like sheen. “Touleen is hot and I just left the stool to cool off,” Slautterback recalls. Chapman was walking past and said “Wow, that’s really neat. It’s still pretty hot. Would you mind if I just stuck this brush in it?” And Slautterback said, “No, give it a whirl.” So now, a short thick paint brush is part of the piece. “It turned out to be one of our kind of fun pieces,” Chapman says. The couple have two studios in the house, with a dog running between them. They constantly feed off of each other, sharing their thoughts, ideas and receiving each other’s critiques. Slautterback, who became an artist a bit later, says Chapman was an inspiration for him: “She encouraged me.” Touleen machines became his “brushes,” allowing him to create works that no other artist can replicate. Later on, Slautterback expanded into fiber art, beginning with abstract needlepoint in the 1970s and evolving into tapestry loom weaving, using painted canvas strips. An engineer, Slautterback’s work comes with a precision characteristic to a technical field. “When you build machinery it’s all going to be exact,” he says. Many of his works presented at the exhibit come as part of a series. One, titled “Carnival 1,” stands apart, a mixed-media piece with mysterious numbers, indicating measurements, visible on the surface. “Carnival 1” is actually a plan for a large steel sculpture. “Carol saw the plan and said: ‘That’s a piece of art itself. That’s your headwork, you can’t throw that out,’” he says. Chapman adds, “It actually is one of my favorite pieces.” “She’s taking me out of my engineering head,” Slautterback responds, laughing. Looking for pieces that are radically different from others also works when exploring Chapman’s part of the gallery space. Her works on display are mostly empty of human figures. There are traces of human habitation everywhere, but no humans. At the exhibit, the exemptions from the “no humans” rule are two paintings of “Cynthia,” showing a female on a beach chair, with a delicious scarf thrown onto it. The background for it all seems to be a beach and beach sand, but in Chapman’s work, the beach is an ocean of white, a blank space, a lack of beach. That helps to bring the figure and its colors up and closer to the viewer. The other different painting is titled “Time Out,” that shows a man in a baseball cap, sleeping while sitting on a ferry, the sky above him blue and nebulous like dreams, an empty coast with a line of shrubbery visible in the distance. The human mood becomes part of the landscape. “I have been influenced a little bit by Edward Hopper,” Chapman explains. “That’s because when I was growing up, we would spend every summer on Cape Cod.” The exhibit of the works by the colorful couple is just a drop in the ocean of their colorful achievements. “There’s so much that is not in the show,” Chapman says, “because you can’t show everything you’ve done in the last 80 years.” A Colorful Couple: A Retrospective of the Works of Artists Carol Chapman and Fred Slautterback is on display until Oct. 30 at the Marjorie Evans Gallery at Sunset Center, San Carlos and 9th, Carmel. Open 9am-4pm Monday-Friday and during special events. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org. Double Surprise An exhibit of works by a Carmel couple presents an array of media and, especially, colors. By Agata Popęda Above: Sections of Carol Chapman’s “Jill’s House” (left) and Fred Slautterback’s “Big Sur II” (right). Below: Chapman and Slautterback at the opening of their shared exhibit. CAROL CHAPMAN AND FRED SLAUTTERBACK WINSTON BOYER
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