THE VALLEY

Katie Waters’ friendly realism is based on a resolution of apparent opposites. In style, she admires Vermeer and Grant Wood, striving to merge the Dutch master’s light with the American regionalist’s homely charm. Her subject matter fuses unpopulated domestic interiors with landscapes seen through windows and gives them a gentle twist of dislocation.

For example, her Victorian-style home in Indiana may have a view of the Hollywood Hills and California bungalows or of a Manhattan skyline. Waters handles these juxtapositions in such a low-key way that they don’t seem surreal, just dreamy. Her well-crafted paintings often suffer from a lack of emotion but there’s a underlying coziness that seems authentic. A couple of colored drawings gel better, and their texture suits her soft-edged sensibility. “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day” takes a relatively tough look at urban alienation, while “Cafe Venice” exudes the communal warmth of a diner.

Terence Osmond concurrently shows aerial landscapes based on airplane views of the Santa Monica Mountains. They are turbulent, expressionistic views, with undulating hills of dark pigment cut by lighter highways. Instead of using the distance to organize the land into neat compositions, Osmond employs it as a license to engage in drama.

It’s an interesting departure that he hasn’t resolved in this show. The energy seems real, but the paintings don’t hang together very well. Flamboyant red lines--squeezed and dripped from tubes--are probably intended as a unifying touch, but they read as decoration. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, ends today.)