ABOUT THE GALLERY
Established by Steven Pattie, Redwood Retreat Gallery is among the leading galleries on the West Coast featuring the finest in contemporary outsider, folk, and self-taught art. As a gallery we aspire to be a place where we feature and tell the stories of these “off-beat” yet “dead center” artists – our gallery mantra – and to represent the variety of works they create. Our archives feature hundreds of works (paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textiles, and more), by renowned contemporary masters as well as new and rising artists. While we feature a major online presence, by appointment we invite our clients to see select works in person at our private gallery nestled at the edge of the coastal redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains ten miles west of Gilroy.
Over the past two decades, select works from the Redwood Retreat Gallery collection have been selected for and included in a variety of exhibitions at colleges, universities, and museums in the United States and Canada including the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Revolving Museum in Boston, and have are in a variety of private collections across the country.
Steven Pattie with Howard Finster
Redwood Retreat Gallery Interior
Steven settled on historic Redwood Retreat Road in 1966. Originally, these lands were home to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band associated with the Ohlone Nation going back over 4,000 years. In 1863, this verdant hollow on the eastern slope of the Coastal Range which came to be known as Redwood Retreat was established by Charles and Annis Sanders and featured a Victorian hotel (one of two hotels originally on Redwood Retreat Road) and Santa Clara County’s first outdoor swimming pool (and only the second in California). The little village at the end of the road featured a few residents, a small schoolhouse, vineyards, apple and prune orchards, livestock, and more. In 1908 the Gilroy Gazette claimed Redwood Retreat to be “one of the best places for rest and meditation in the state.”
Making it an enviable destination for those who love wine and art, the gallery is situated on the Santa Clara Valley Wine Trail and is within walking distance of two of South County’s finest wineries, Martin Ranch Winery and Fernwood Cellars.
Redwood Retreat has been home to a long history of writers and creative people who have made the small valley their home, including writers Frank Norris, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Allan Bosworth, who made his retreat from the city life in 1948 and advanced his career with the publication of his book Cabin in the Hills about his days as an expatriate from the big city on Redwood Retreat Road.
In his classic work The Unknown Craftsman by art critic, philosopher, and founder of the folk craft movement in Japan Soetsu Yanagi. he speaks eloquently about beauty. He talks about the viewing of art in the right setting. Redwood Retreat Gallery is the perfect environment for this art. Within earshot is the seasonal creek running behind the gallery are resident quail, a lone bobcat, and a red tail hawk named Sierra where she nests and keeps watch. The barn that now houses the gallery was built by Steven’s father in 1969 from harvested old growth redwood lumber and repurposed as a shelter for his 1963 John Deere crawler. Yanagi envisioned the folk art gallery he created in Japan a hundred years ago, as “a meeting place where one may come into contact with the religion of beauty” and that is what this gallery and its immediate environment is about. He goes on to say that he would like the visitor not so much to “’meet the craftsman at home” but as to see how such things he or she creates fit into everyday life and to take home some ideas and works of art that enrich his own life.
Redwood Retreat Gallery looks forward to the opportunity of broadening our relationship with you to enhance both your enjoyment of our art and the way in which you live with it.