La Cienega Area

Christopher Warner is in the throes of a painterly romance with the great outdoors. Transplanted to Los Angeles from Colorado and Montana, he dreams of lowering clouds and lonely flatlands in mountain country punctuated by lesser monuments of the human species. A satellite dish rises from pinkish-gray scrubland in “Receiver”; the bright blue rectangle of a portable toilet looks downright jaunty on a patch of gray earth in “San-O-Let”; an abandoned gas station island offers an elegiac note against a rosy sky in “Self Serve.”

The most intense paintings are dark views. In “Smith River,” beyond the blue-black roiling water a cliff built of a brown mosaic of rounded shapes bulks with transfigured grandeur. In “Gulf Warrior,” silhouettes of men with guns on a submarine loom like bogeymen against a darkling sea under a yellow sky. The “man’s view” of nature embodied in these scenes suggests comparisons with the poems of James Dickey or the fiction of Thomas McGuane.

Houston-based Malinda Beeman, is also a landscape painter, but her universe is engaged in a fussy frenzy of activity, with a nod to Van Gogh. In “Tree at Tongariro, New Zealand,” the gnarled zig-zagging branches overlook rocks leaning every which way, rows of pyramidal green crops in a distant valley, vertiginous hills complete with a waterfall and heaving, waterfall-like cliff with rocks or clots of earth clinging, against all gravitational probability, to its underside. Even the sky comes sliced up into curvilinear patterns of rose and blue.

The almost cartoon-like fever of such compositions suggests a traveler’s bedazzlement with spectacular foreign views and gives Beeman a readily identifiable style. Toothier paintings, such as “Orange Flowers by the Sea,” are somewhat simpler. They dwell on fanciful sights--two cliffs meeting head-to-head, bright twisting flowers planted in red earth. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 4.)