SANTA MONICA

Joyce Treiman’s current work doesn’t look all that different from her familiar fantasy-tinged realism but its effect is movingly new. A generous spread of nearly 50 paintings and drawings finds her evoking a dappled, poignant, turn-of-the-century immigrant America, but she turns this rumination on the past into a vision of the future.

She waits on the dock to board a luxurious cruise ship, playing herself as the usual Raggedy Ann waif now young and romantic, in love with a mustachioed stranger in a bowler hat. Sometimes they are a vaudeville team doing a turn in a music hall, sometimes a fashionable couple taking off on an ocean voyage, she swathed in white fur. The largest work shows the couple giddy in the far West where she is both herself and a tow-headed Indian chief.

The colors of French Impressionism are translated into ruddy Yankee optimism. There is a flavor of E. L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” high-spirited and surprised. But Treiman plays sleight of hand with time so that past and future become present and the story is of an adventure with a happy ending evolving into a new, somehow more spiritual odyssey.

It is hard to form any rational explanation of this work’s combination of lyricism and poignancy. Some spontaneous landscapes of local beach towns offer a clue in their combination of high-key palette and slightly slowed brushwork. No such easy formula comes close to clarifying the extraordinary depth of Treiman’s portrait drawings of her mother, Rose. Precious few artists since Rembrandt have captured the deep dignity of old age or loved it as much as Treiman does in images that evoke tears of gratitude for making us momentarily wiser than we are. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd. to Dec. 27.)