Wilshire Center

Texas painter Trudy Veit’s flat-patterned interiors are filled with pan-ethnic accouterments: Japanese clogs, Caribbean striped pajamas, a Matisse-like uptilted tiled floor, Greek columns, black-and-white American Indian baskets, red-and-blue pennants a la Dufy, a voodoo amulet, a Kachina.

“Caribbean Fantasy” suggests a tourist’s dizzy embrace of island culture. A nude white woman with a huge insect on her thigh and a tiny image of herself hanging from a necklace is surrounded by shrill green parrots, a statuette of a dozing fellow in a sombrero and jaunty folk portraits of black people. Another household possession is a vernacular advertisement for a cafe, with beaming fried eggs, bacon, catsup bottle and a floating banana topped by a mountain vista with scudding clouds. Outdoors, a cozy star-dotted night sky hangs over the cobblestones and a pastel jumble of buildings.

Some paintings show human confrontations that seem less compelling than Veit’s densely decorative effects. In a Japanese bathhouse scene, “You’ll Pay Through the Nose,” a reclining nude wrapped in an immense decorated cloak issues an order to an attendant. Vying for the eye’s attention are multiple scenes glimpsed in other rooms plus large and small items scattered about, including a peculiar memento mori: a skeleton figure in a tiny box.

Los Angeles artist Moira Hahn’s recent watercolor self-portraits are ironic views of Contemporary Woman. In one the artist poses in a trenchcoat, as if posing for the cover of a vintage detective novel. Fake-looking raindrops fall, eyeballs are scattered here and there, and the whole package is wrapped with a winding ribbon stamped “1984.”

In a Hawaiian image (after her divorce from painter Masami Teraoka), she becomes a hula girl sweeping away a pair of her ex’s familiar specs.

Older work runs through a brisk repertoire of personal and global themes, some with hints of Teraoka’s style: Hahn in exercise gear, clutching pints of Haagen-Dazs near the curl of an ocean wave out of a Japanese print; Hahn riding an exercise bike in front of a pseudo-Tantric image representing stages of a nuclear explosion.

A scrupulous sensitivity to the natural world and its imperiled state--particularly suited to the precise watercolor medium--runs through several of the earlier, more unself-conscious paintings. (April Sgro-Riddle Gallery, 836 N. La Brea Ave., to May 11.)