Santa Monica

Joseph DiGiorgio recalls a seminal America where idealism blended with realism. His pointillist based pastels of craggy mountaintops bathed in clear light are steeped in the tradition of the Hudson River painters. But his serial imagery of unspoiled rivers, dense trees and California coastline owes even more to the early photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge and the atmospheric images of Ansel Adams.

Despite picture-postcard familiarity DiGiorgio’s images do not pretend to be photographic copies of the landscape. He does his paintings in New York working from memory, sketches and a few photographs taken on trips. True to this distance of time and space, the color has the vibrant intensity of memory more than nature and each scene has the cleaned up, slightly out of focus perfection of a cherished recollection or a grainy reproduction on a scenic city billboard.

For all DiGiorgio’s bright color and impressionist pastel technique, however, these pictures are in many ways like the millions of snapshots that fill vacation scrapbooks .

Despite a bland, one-liner approach, the work stirs compelling sociological implications. These drawings revere an experience that is still possible but threatened. What will it mean when only pictures remain to remind us of the beauty and power of the land? (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., to Oct. 5.)--S.G.