Portrait of an Artist in Paradise

Maybe you know those Ojai party nights. Whether Ojai is your home or you’re lucky enough to find yourself here, you’ll recognize the picture I’m about to paint. A little buzzed and more than a little loved up, you head for a breather or you head for home – and you walk out into a nocturnal landscape of devastating beauty, galaxies above you, sparkling moonlit terrain before you, and the rustling of dark spreading oaks all around. Behind you, the party’s still glowing. And there where the sky meets the mountains, the faintest remains of the day — or, if it’s been a good one, the first glimmer of tomorrow. Once seen, never forgotten: spellbinding.

This is the scene that Ojai-based artist and musician Domonic Dean Breaux has explored in a quartet of new paintings, which will feature in his solo exhibition “Do What You Love Until You

Die” at the Ojai Art Center, on show through July and August 2023.

You’ve probably encountered Dom’s artistry already. He helped create the distinctive look and feel of two hotels in town, the Blue Iguana and Emerald Iguana Inns, including the giant sculpted iguanas that seem to prowl around their gardens.

In 2021, he transformed two dull electricity boxes in Libbey Park into a funky vision of orange blossom and Birds of Paradise, after winning a commission from the City of Ojai Public Art Fund Project. If you visit the Casa Barranca Winery, up on Foothill Road in one of the finest Greene and Greene houses of the Arts and Crafts style, you’ll see Dom’s huge mural of moonlit oaks, a subject that he’s also explored in a stunning recent work at the Taft Gardens. And if you make an appointment, you can see Dom’s extraordinary restoration of mid-century decorations at Meditation Mount, following their destruction in the Thomas Fire of 2017. You might even have seen the Grumann Motorhome that Dom decorated for a client, covered in a dazzling pattern of metallic green and gold flickering forms, like a Gustav Klimt painting trundling along Ojai Avenue. All the while, he’s been performing with renowned Ojai musicians like The Tribal Loungemen, Euphoria, and Tony Khalife, bringing the swirling yet languorous energy of his paintings to his saxophone and flute.

Nattily dressed, occasionally mustachioed, always walking to a distinctive beat, Dom has loved playing with patterns, both visual and musical, since childhood. Born in Los Angeles to Louisiana Cajun and Creole parents, he grew up at a time when the city’s public schools offered intensive arts programs, allowing children to explore their creativity to the max. This propelled him towards study at the California Institute of the Arts and the Brandes Art Institute, before an extensive career as a commercial artist in the city.

He has painted billboards on Sunset Boulevard, created set designs and storyboards for major Hollywood studios, and contributed to group exhibitions in venues such as the ACE Gallery and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, all while moonlighting as an avant-garde musician on the city’s underground club scene.

Then one day in 2017, while struggling to find an affordable apartment in LA, he got a call from a friend in Ojai with accommodation for him. He’d always wanted to live here, blown away by what he’d seen of the community and the landscape. “When I first saw it, I think I was in my early 30s, coming over the East End and seeing the valley, it looked like Tuscany. I thought, ‘We’re so close to Los Angeles, I can’t believe this is here’.” So he grabbed the opportunity, and found himself living in a place that felt like paradise by contrast with the concrete jungle he’d left behind.

Ojai is “sublime, tranquil, dark at night. You’ve got the sage-y creek smells and the orange blossoms and the wildlife. It has all the trappings of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley, but better. And I get to share that with my daughter Maile. She’s going to have all these great childhood sensory experiences, just like I had.”

And the community here? “Unlike LA, where you can live down the street from your friend and never see them, you actually bump into people you know when you go out here. You can’t go run an errand without having a 45-minute esoteric conversation with someone along the way!”

His new home also presented new possibilities for his art. “At last, I had room to set up an oil painting studio. In my little single unit in LA, I’d mostly worked in acrylics. I’d never had the space to really bust out the oils.” Now, canvases he’d been holding onto for years came alive as he started responding to the Ojai landscape. His first oil painting in 20 years was Soule Rocket, a prismatic vision of the playground in Soule Park, whose towering shape and joyful subject matter expresses the sense of optimism and opportunity that Dom feels here.

Soule Rocket forms the centerpiece of his new exhibition, alongside the wide range of artworks he’s made since, liberated from the grind of urban life and able to really explore his creativity. For Dom, that means listening out for what calls to him. “A lot of things here — cactuses, roots, skies — they’re telling me to paint them. My job then is to make them look like how they want to look –almost like my mind has very little to do with it. It’s like I’m tapped into something beyond me and my daily life.” The result is some fifty exhibited artworks — paintings, sculptures, and drawings — which offer a playful, meditative, and enigmatic vision of Ojai as seen through the filter of Pop Art, Surrealism, and Dom’s sensibility. “I love anything with shape, form, where your eye travels, where it pulls you in, anything that evokes the hand of the person that made it. That’s why I struggle with the whole AI thing: you don’t feel the history of the person whose hand is in it.”

The title of Dom’s exhibition similarly invites us to celebrate life itself, and repeats the phrase uttered to him by his sister at his mother’s deathbed. “She said, ‘Do what you love until you die’, and I said, ‘Right on, OK, I’m going to go ahead and do that’. And I was lucky enough to be able to do that in Ojai, which has really opened up the meaning of that phrase for me. I hope the exhibition encourages people to revel in the intricate beauty and splendor of our surroundings here. If you do that, if you look closely at the world in all its details, you’ll never get bored. There’s always something breathtaking ahead of you.”

“Do What You Love Until You Die” is on show from July 1st to August 30th at the Ojai Art Center, 113 South Montgomery Street, Ojai. Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.