La Cienega Area

Paul Harryn spins out whirling linear adventures in a group of charcoal and pastel drawings. Marshaling striped shapes, scattered white squiggles and a cacophony of spiraling forms, the Venice artist is marvelously inventive and energetic.

A comic-book Futurism underlies some of these pieces, like the one with the stylized billows of smoke and curving biomorphic shapes that look like amusement park rides. Another untitled drawing features whisking curves like “motion” lines in cartoons, and in yet another Harryn pungently juxtaposes an awkward white truncheon shape with a spiky circle filled with delicate doodling.

Taking his inspiration from the Penelope Lively novel, “Moon Tiger”--for which his drawing series is named--Harryn unfortunately also goes in for vapid “cosmic” images of figures a la ‘60s hippie art. Some of the more recent abstract pieces are also marred by too many flaccid forms and touches of color, crowding out the eccentric visual rhythms that are the Venice musician-artist’s major compositional device. (Myers/Lamprise Gallery, 1104 S. La Cienega Blvd., to Saturday.)