Chris Chapman and John Iwerks’s shared passions have resulted in a successful professional and personal partership
Chris Chapman came into the world with the eye of an artist. She was born in Pasadena, lived at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and attended school in Las Virgenes Canyon. As a youth she appreciated and absorbed the detail of the beauty of the natural world that surrounded her.
Developing her innate artistic nature, she became a plein air landscape painter and a member of the Pastel Society of America and Santa Barbara’s Oak Group of dedicated land preservation painters.
“By character, I’m very observant. I see the little things. I remember walking home from the bus stop, and I’d be the only one looking up at the sky and urging my friends to, ‘Look at the sky!’ but nobody looked. I had a fanciful head, I think. I started writing poetry at 9, and at 14 I began painting. At 18 I attended college in Oregon,” she said.
She moved from Oregon to San Francisco, living there for a couple of years, but the city wasn’t her cup of tea. She returned to Oregon, where she worked as a bookkeeper for 10 years.
However, she came back to California and the Central Coast to be with her parents and eventually found her own place in Santa Barbara.
“I started working for Mike Love as an office manager for the Beach Boys,” she continued.
Although deep in the managerial aspects of her job during the day, she continued painting in her spare time, joining the Santa Barbara Art Association and doing oil paintings and watercolors. It was there she met her life partner.
“I met my husband, John Iwerks, at Gallery 113 and became a member of the Santa Barbara Art Association,” she continued. “John was managing Gallery 113 at the time. I had been working as a bookkeeper and became the manager/treasurer for the gallery and showed my art there.”
In Iwerks, who was born and raised in Burbank, California, Chapman found another person whose life was surroundedby art.
“I grew up in an artistic family,” said Iwerks. “My dad, Don, worked for Disney as the head of the machine and camera shop and was the recipient of an Academy Award for Lifetime Technical Achievement in the film industry. He created many of the filming innovations that were used by Disney Studio. My aunt Carlene painted, my uncle David was a portrait photographer, my sister Leslie is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, my brother Larry is a gifted landscape painter, and my grandfather, Ub Iwerks, created Mickey Mouse with Walt Disney in 1928.”
Iwerks was also one of the founding members of the aforementioned Oak Group that Chapman was a part of.
In 1995, Chapman became interested in geology and took geology and art classes at Santa Barbara City College. She also taught a number of art classes at the SBCC adult education campus for 15 years.
“My first class was called ‘Nature in Collage.’ I also taught watercolor, pastel, and botanical illustration. I originally thought I would become a writer because I liked to write, but I ended up being a painter of landscapes, with a little writing on the side,” she said.
While working at Gallery 113 and with the Oak Group, she and John Iwerks discovered they had a lot in common, dated, and eventually married.
“John and I were married in 1999. We camped out on the Carrizo Plain and painted on our honeymoon while on our way to the Kern River,” she said.
In 2000, the couple was asked to manage Arroyo Hondo Preserve before it opened.
“In October 2001, J.J. Hollister III negotiated the sale of the ranch to the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, and since then the Land Trust has worked with great commitment to protect and restore Arroyo Hondo Preserve’s natural and historic resources, biodiversity, and native wildlife,” Chapman wrote in her book titled, “Stories of Arroyo Hondo.”
“I did all of the organizational work of setting up visitation summaries. There were researchers, biologists, habitat restoration people, the public, and school kids — all of that had to be on a spreadsheet to itemize the visitations,” she recalled.
However, Chapman felt she was kept from her true calling. “Here I was in a painter’s paradise and spending all my time in front of the computer,” she said.
After about five years, she asked her boss if he could show her Dos Pueblos Ranch so she could go there and paint.
“He gave me permission to meet with the owners, and I just fell in love with Dos Pueblos Ranch. There was a little red hunting cabin under sycamore trees and avocado orchards near a watershed with trout,” she said. “He let us move in there. We lived there for nine years. They sold the up-canyon portion to an avocado company that restored the canyon. That’s when we moved to the Santa Ynez Valley. By that time, I was painting a lot and selling with the Oak Group.”
She was commissioned to illustrate botanical watercolors in a book called “Chumash Ethnobotany” by Jan Timbrook, and the Carrizo Plain asked for her botanical paintings for its visitor’s center.
“They were printed on wood about 4 feet tall, so I had a room with printed botanicals and a big pastel painting in the main room of rain flowing over the Carrizo,” she described. “The Wildling, now called the California Natural Art Museum, produced a film about that, which John and I were both in. We were also in another film about Ray Strong. I was also on the board of the Wildling Museum.”
Her book, “Stories of Arroyo Hondo,” was published in 2016 and contained not only her art but short stories and vintage photographs about the history of the region.
“I wanted to write the history of the area in a way that was engaging and that paired with our paintings to assist the docents of Arroyo Hondo Preserve,” said Chapman.
Previously she wrote a book featuring her artwork titled “Portraits of Gaviota,” which was published in 2005.
Chapman and Iwerks are also a part of “The Tuesday Group,” a group of artists that meet every Tuesday. It was startedby two female artists who wanted to paint plein air, and it has since grown into a large group that meets weekly at a variety of art-inspiring locations.
When asked about her hobbies and her life in the Valley, it seems that her day-to-day life is her hobby, for the most part.
“Gardening and painting are my two favorite things to do,” said Chapman. “But a lot of my time is taken up withrunning our art business.”
“What I appreciate most about my life is that John and I are best friends and teammates and that we both appreciate the spiritual nature of our earth and beyond,” she concluded.
For more information, visit chapmaniwerks.com
