La Cienega Area

Four tenured English artists continue the hoopla of the UK/LA Festival. Los Angeles knows Michael Heindorff as a master of Carborundum etching and wispy scenes of the English countryside that have the same easy appeal as Hockney’s recent canyon scapes. Here in place of Happy Easter pastel tones and quaint hillside cottages, Heindorff serves up abstract paintings with a murky undercoat of brick marbled with burnt reddish strokes and black serpentine tendrils. Rectangles of atmospheric green or blue move the eye convincingly in and out of these assured works, but they just don’t compete with the lovable hedonism of the artist’s representational style.

Ivor Abrahams shows bronze female nudes ranging from a few inches to two feet tall and modeled with a Rodinesque clunkiness that is sketchy yet controlled to the last sinuous contour. Whether frolicking as in “Wall Majorettes” or arching backwards in poses a Yogi would envy, these odalisques radio a femininity that is coy, fragile but formidable.

England’s affair with Romanticism in all its broody excess is alive and well in the representational paintings of Kevin Sinnott. Works describe huddled, hunched down-trodden peasants. Sinnott builds troubled faces and deep-set eyes from pockets of dark green, blue and salmon; figures are thick as if weighed down by life. In “Mother and Child,” a huge anguished female cradles a tiny newborn. In “The Barber,” something as innocuous as a haircut takes on the sinister portent of a sacrifice.

Finally, the widely exhibited watercolorist William Tillyer shows translucent billows set afloat in a generous white ground. Tillyer travels and sketches from nature and some of these works--with green shrubby marks canopied by blue puffs--look as if they might be capturing the changing misty topography of England. Others look like abstract arrangements of loose pleasant color. In either case, the abbreviated marks that worked so well for someone like Arthur Dove look dangerously facile here. (Jan Turner, 8000 Melrose Ave., to April 30.).