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VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 | FALL 2019
Everything about Boulting has a soft, whispery quality, from the Ojai artist’s peaceful oil paintings of the Buddha, fruit, landscapes and rescue dogs, to her gentle voice and tranquil yoga studio. Boulting, a former actress who starred as the young love interest of Robert DeNiro’s character in “The Last Tycoon,” directed by Elia Kazan, spoke prophetic lines in the 1976 movie based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel: “I want a quiet life.” That is just what Boulting has created for herself. In the 1980s, she left behind life as a ballerina, fashion model, Hollywood actress and New York resident to move west, first to Taos, N.M., then Los Angeles, eventually settling in Ojai to become a yoga teacher, artist, mom and animal lover. All her interests are related. Boulting even once created a business card that used the term “yogart.” Like yoga, art is “a meditation,” Boulting said. I look at a still life, like a broken-up pomegranate or cherries, and see all these different textures. I think, ‘How do I even begin to capture that?’ As in yoga, it’s about letting go, then just starting, and something else takes over.” Fittingly, Boulting, one of the artists featured on the 36th annual Ojai Studio Artists Tour, slated for Oct. 12 to 14, will demonstrate and display her work in her Sacred Space Studio for yoga in downtown Ojai. Sculptor Martha Moran, an OSA member and one
Life as Ingrid Boulting of the tour organizers, said Boulting and her art “embody a lot of the vibrations of Ojai. Everything is so serene.” This year’s tour will feature nine new artists, Moran said. With so many artists now participating (more than 60), the tour’s base will no longer be the Ojai Art Center, which isn’t large enough to show samples of work by all the
By Karen Lindell
participants. Instead, visitors can start their tour and see examples at the Ojai Valley Museum, where a themed exhibit, “Origins,” features works by OSA artists. “Origins can be anything, and each artist is interpreting it differently,” Moran said. “I’m taking it personally, with a work about my family. Another artist, Hallie Katz,
has a fossil piece that’s about the origins of life on Earth. Others are talking about the origins of their creativity.” Boulting, for her “Origins” exhibit piece, is showing a painting of lavender titled “Lucky Lavender,” created in an impressionistic style she favored earlier in her artistic career.