WILSHIRE CENTER

Ted Twine, a Japanese-born American artist, has invented a theory about color, and he seems determined to allow it to obscure his wonderfully fey drawing style. The fact is, trios of squares in primary colors are far more likely to suggest traffic lights than “the remembrance of the Source,” whatever that may be. But Twine goes about doggedly inflicting his color squares on pale watercolors (“Inlandia Series”) that depict such sights as combative flowers hurling stamens at each other, Thurber-esque dogs, a howling animal-eared woman and an askew landscape.

He also turns out unabashedly winsome monoprints, with watercolor and wash additions, of “spirit typles”--a “wet angel” with heart-shaped, billowing wings, an earflapped aviator, a dancing bear.

But of course no serious career could be advanced these days with such modest-looking work. So Twine has done a slew of very large, T-shaped “Tantra” paintings in which his gift for pinning down stray fancies solidifies into a sort of codified naivete. Huge outlines of phallic shapes and breast shapes and French bread shapes, a curling scribble like a pulled-apart Slinky and similar devices look like desperate strivings for a wise simplicity. But they’re just not convincing, not even when rendered in the magic red, blue and yellow. (April Sgro Riddle Gallery, 836 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 19.)