Russell Crotty
2025/26
INVITATIONAL STUDIO RESIDENT
Visual Artist from Ojai
Photo by Mikael Jorgensen, Graphics by Louise Sandhaus
Each year, we invite an artist from our community to be an Invitational Artist-in-Residence. These artists are either at a career stage where they would not normally apply, or they are uniquely compatible with our program, and we are interested in what they might create with special access to the gardens.
In the 2025/26 season that honor was awarded to Russell Crotty, an Ojai-based artist whose epic drawings of starry nights, rock formations, surf, and various other wonders of nature are internationally known.
A long-time Taft collaborator, Russell, and his partner, Laura Gruenther regularly host popular Stargazing events on the mesa overlooking the gardens.
Photo by Mikael Jorgensen.
During his time in the Protea Studio, Russell worked diligently, exploring, observing, collecting, and recording visuals of flora, land contours, ridge lines, rock formations, and the night sky.
In Our Corner of the Galaxy, 2025, Ink, gouache and color pencil on paper, 10 x 8 inches
His aim was to create a Taft-specific vernacular by drawing the plants and landmarks on the property and visually connecting them to the cosmos using text, symbols, and nomenclature.
Blooming Aloes with Mars Opposition, 2025
Artist Statement and Residency Reflection
“Between the lush, ephemeral plant growth, the nuances of light, and the glorious quiet, my wanderings in and around the gardens elevated me from daily madness to a slowed down, contemplative mindset in which to explore, ponder and draw the invaluable beauty of Taft Gardens and its celestial canopy.
The periodicity, or cyclical patterns and rhythms, of both terrestrial and celestial phenomena is fascinating. The sycamore turns shades of yellow in fall. The mechanics of the night sky on any given day is set.
Each of these are moments of grandeur yet each are ever-changing, fleeting… never to be repeated in exactly the same way. This sparks my imagination.
Engaging my passion and knowledge of astronomy, I developed a series of juxtaposed scenarios pairing landscape elements with celestial objects – for instance, the planet Saturn with a specific tree, the Milky Way with a particular section of the garden, or the moon rising above a classic Coast Live Oak in a meadow. The resulting drawings are marked with the poetic intensity of time and place, terrestrial and celestial.
Comet Over Amiable Ciphers, 2025
This residency was a wondrous experience: comforting in being hidden from societal madness, revitalizing in connecting with something bigger on our very small, yet very significant planet.”
Photo by Eric Anderson. Evening Exhibition Opening, June 6, 2026.
