‘I’m scared now that I want to give up everything for the sake of art.’

The images that became Johnny Otis’ sculpture came to him 40 years ago. He was the proprietor then of the Barrel House Club across the street from Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, a white man becoming a scion of black music.

In a world that was creating the new sound of rhythm and blues, Otis discovered and promoted such artists as Etta James and Big Mama Thornton while writing and performing his own music.

All the time Otis was watching the simple, almost rural life of Simon Rodia’s neighborhood.

Otis began putting the images into form only a year and a half ago in the back room of his Altadena home, using gauze and plaster like a doctor laying a cast. Painted bright colors, the waist-high statues are primitive, fantastic, funny and sad--a vested preacher asleep in his chair with his choir book on his lap, a girl stuffing watermelon into a toddler’s mouth, two black women pouring tea, a mother fawning over her baby in a crib and another wailing over hers in a coffin.

Oddly, Otis’ first invitation to show his work took him Sunday to the austere formality of Warner Center.

In the ninth, and so far most engaging, show to go into an experimental gallery on loan from Warner Center developer Robert Voit, the San Fernando Arts Council paired Otis’ beguiling Afro-American reflections with the kooky, sensuous, fractured comic-book-style paintings of Reseda artist Michael Peters.

Peters too was coming out after a long gestation. The exhibit is his first in 17 years.

As a young artist, he attracted notice as part of the Grundgy school, but then abruptly dropped from sight to become an ad agent and raise a family.

At a reception and opening Sunday afternoon, Otis and Peters each did his thing for a wine-sipping crowd of about 250, creating a wild interplay of contrast and coincidence.

At one end of the gallery, Otis sat at the piano, tall, fluid, striking in a raggedly pointed beard and waxed-down hair. His sons, Shuggie and Nickie, played behind him on electric guitar and drums in a six-piece band that also included male and female vocalists and a woman in sequined black hat who sang and played the trumpet. For an hour they played music of the ‘50s and ‘60s loud, fast and precise.

The wine and cheese set swayed and bounced as the band did Otis’ most celebrated song, “Hand Jive.”

All the while, at the other end, Peters, in slacks, turquoise pullover and a puff of styled gray hair, greeted friends from art and advertising as his daughter, in a blue print dress, tugged at his arm.

Because of the music, Peters led me out into the lobby to tell his story, in chronological order.

He said he quit art after a pinball machine he had modified for a show in San Francisco was dropped and broken. Facing humiliation, he got drunk and poured a bag of manure over the machine and immersed the plug in a glass of Chablis.

The critics loved it, called it “the symbolic monolithic death of the machine,” Peters said. “I said, ‘Get me out of here.’ ” For the last 16 years, I worked in what I thought was the real world.”

He fulfilled the side of himself that cried out, “Give me logos, press release kits, marketing reports.”

It paid the bills. Soon he even moved to the Valley.

“I swore to God I would never live in the Valley,” he said. “You move to the Valley when you’re middle class and you’ve got to make a move for your family’s sake.”

In the line of duty, Peters recently called on the Arts Council, soliciting work.

During the conversation, the unfulfilled side of him rose up. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “I’m talking about the wrong thing. I can’t hold it any more. It’s like being pregnant and not being able to deliver.”

He asked if he could do a show.

As he watched his wife in a pink cotton dress playing with their daughter on the patio outside, Peters said he was scared.

“I have never been able to position myself so the meaning of art and the meaning of dollars have a meeting,” he said, in an increasingly excited monologue. “This show has caused me to have a serious shoot-out with myself. I’m scared now that I want to give up everything for the sake of art. I have divided myself. Oh, God. I’m so afraid of the lack of time left. If I don’t do art, I will die.”

Back in the gallery, a large black woman arrived, leading a thin, blind man in an old suit.

The man ran his hands across some of Otis’ statues.

Then, after “Long Tall Sally,” Otis stood up and said that Blind Joe Hill was going to play.

Blind Joe strapped on a harmonica and sang the blues.

Otis, still half in a sweat, spoke graciously to everyone who approached. He said he is happy but at the same time vexed to find his music enjoying a revival just as he has begun to sculpt.

“I’m truly frustrated,” he told a woman. “Now that I’m on fire wanting to do this, I’m going on the road and I don’t have much time.”

As the crowd dispersed, Otis approached his wife, Phyllis, who had waited through the show, and asked for some money. She had $3.

“Hey Shuggie, you got some change?” he hailed his son.

He gave a handful of dollar bills to the woman with Blind Joe Hill. For gas to get home.