ART / Cathy Curtis : Short-Short Stories on Canvas, in Vernacular

The portly fellow in the homburg reaches into the park’s trash can to pull out a newspaper. A few feet away, a woman on the grass squirms in a passionate embrace while her lover remains oblivious to the coiled snake behind him.

Ben Messick titled the scene “Yesterday’s News,” drily alluding to the hoary notion--dating back to the Garden of Eden--of woman as temptress. Along with 40 more of Messick’s little-known works, the lithograph is on view at the Laguna Art Museum through Nov. 13.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, Messick was Southern California’s answer to the Midwest’s Thomas Hart Benton and New York’s Reginald Marsh. Sniffing around street corners, parks and other gathering places, he found a wealth of human comedy to cram into drawings, paintings and lithographs.

A strapping fellow with a pixie-like demeanor, Messick was a child of the Missouri Ozarks, the son of a prospector who managed a country store and stepson of an itinerant preacher who ran off, like a character in a traveling-salesman joke, with a woman in the choir.

After service in World War I, Messick made his way to Los Angeles, where he supported himself by working as a dishwasher in a boardinghouse. In 1925, when he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), he listed his birth date as 1901--at least a dozen years shy of the mark, probably because of embarrassment at being considerably older than the other students.

He is said to have spent a leisurely seven years at Chouinard, doing odd jobs to keep himself afloat; however, the school’s records show him to have been there for just 1 1/2 terms. In subsequent decades, ensconced in a seedy room in downtown L.A., he turned out thousands of sketches while teaching life drawing at Chouinard and elsewhere.

Then, in 1949, he married Velma Hay, a widow in his adult education class, and discovered what home life was all about. Domesticated, he lost his interest in making art.

Longtime friend Janice Lovoos of Laguna Hills asked him why he was content to spend his time watching TV. “Janice,” he answered, “I think I’ve said it all.” He died of cancer in 1981.

Like other strong U.S. regional art, Messick’s is the product of a quirky, frequently satirical outlook. He peered under the polite social veneer of everyday life to snag crude details and the points at which human vanities and desires take on the naked look of animal urges.

Odd details also have a way of turning up in the corners and periphery of his work--nowhere more curiously than in the view of a camera perched on the outmost expanse of a bulging stomach, poking up from the lower edge of “Rehearsing the Elephant Act.” The artist exposes the elephant act as part of a casually cynical circus publicity machinery, set in motion for press photographers eager to fill their quotas of cute human interest shots.

As if mirroring the eternally restless people in his art, Messick played with several styles in his paintings, juggling several at a time. Like other regional artists of the era, he tried to adapt the grand legacy of European art to American moods and situations. But his style is primarily a means to an end: serving up the facts with a twist of lemon.

A luminous, feathery application of paint shows off a punningly titled trio of “Beach Combers.” Seated on the sand, a blonde in a two-piece bathing suit holds a mirror for a redhead adjusting her hairdo while a muscular fellow grasping a hank of blonde tresses stares hungrily at the redhead.

“Children’s Playground,” painted in Messick’s spic-and-span, smooth-surfaced manner, has the unctuous brightness of a morality tale. Hyperactive children play, fight, suckle and threaten mayhem under the watchful eyes of their adult keepers. In the distance a laborer toils with a hoe: Bringing up children is yeoman work, no doubt about it.

Even the artist’s rather tepid, latter-day approach to Cubism suits its subject matter to a T . In “Beach Boy,” the faceted niceties of this style are exactly right for a portrait of a ridiculously self-conscious hunk, sporting a cane and shades and cocking his hip like a bathing beauty. In “Clown From Outer Space,” the subject’s glistening brown eyes seem dolefully imprisoned in the broad planes of color that model his face.

Messick’s workaday realism is better able to dwell on the complex relationships of circus folk. In “Clown’s Family,” the clown, who seems to have a faint halo around his head, provides a comforting perch for one of his children. His wife, a dreamy woman with high cheekbones, sits alone in a provocative pose that allows the viewer to look up her dress.

A venture into a thickly encrusted method of paint application yielded a marvelous friezelike painting of people scrunched up in telephone booths (“Telephones”) with an impatient woman waiting outside.

But the rapid, tossed-off look of the lithographs--which he didn’t even bother to hand-sign and number--offer some of the most memorable images of restless, rootless Californians.

“Main Street Cafe Society” is a hurried restaurant world of slurped soup and conversations on the run. “Waiting for the Bus” introduces an odd jumble of folks, each one a weary island of impatience.

In “Jitterbug Contest,” the manic frenzy of the music translates into the arc of a dancer lifted into a horizontal position by her partner: her thighs glued to his hips, her face a rubbery African mask.

(Elsewhere, Messick’s treatment of blacks seems more inclined toward the sentimental typecasting common to his era: the noble athlete, the charismatic preacher.)

A few clinkers aside--the bland boats-in-the-harbor watercolors might have been dispensed with--Messick’s work is the genuine article: short-short stories on canvas and paper about real people, related in a punchy American vernacular.

“Ben Messick: An American Scene Painter” continues at the Laguna Art Museum through Nov. 13. The museum, at 307 Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Information: (714) 494-6531.