Yard Sale 4 You

It isn’t often you can get me to visit two art galleries in a day. I’m an East Oakland guy and know nothing of Cubism, Dadaism, surrealism or the southern Sung school of Chinese impressionism. But I do know a half-naked woman and a yard sale when I see them. I mean yeard sale.

The half-naked lady was not a painting but a real person at the Andrea Ross Gallery in Santa Monica. She was viewing the cutout art of Stephen Verona, who is described as a film maker-slash-artist, though others just call him a celebrity artist and add, “Isn’t he exciting?” as though it’s part of his name.

I was at the Ross Gallery because art is what’s goin’ on in Santa Monica, and because the opening of Verona’s much-heralded “Gone With the Wind” exhibit promised to be a Hollywood happening with spotlights, booze, limos and warm young women with acting aspirations. I wasn’t disappointed.

Take the half-naked lady. She was dressed in see-through black lace, under which she wore something less than a string bikini to cover those erogenous zones popularized years ago in Playboy magazine. She’d have been arrested in Omaha.

Godiva was one of many good-looking women and pretty men who jammed into the gallery at the opening of Verona’s exhibit, a series of sketches and painted cutouts depicting characters and scenes from the movie GWTW. This, in case you didn’t know it, is the film’s 50th anniversary.

Verona, an amiable man with a beard and a ponytail, attracts a show biz following, the aforementioned beauties among them. There were also a massive person in a tank top who stood 6-feet-8 and must have weighed 300 pounds and a tiny bald man in tight pants, a brocade top and cowboy boots.

There were no such characters at the USC Atelier Gallery in the mall known as Santa Monica Place. There was just artist John White, a graduate student named Lisa, who was modestly attired in jeans and blouse, White’s little daughter and 500 yard sale signs.

White is a serious artist who usually does abstracts, but he is also a yard sale junkie who, over the last several years, has collected artifacts and signs from yard, garage, lawn, parking lot, porch, rummage, estate, divorce, moving and death-in-the-family sales.

He combined them into an exhibit of folk art at the behest of the Atelier, and it strikes at the very heart of weekend L.A. I felt like a bargain-hunter in Yard Sale Heaven.

Sale signs of every style, size and color fill an entire wall. Some are illustrated, many are clever and a few are misspelled. There’s a “Yeard Sale,” for instance, and a “Yad Sale.” There is also a “Stop Me From Selling My Mother” sale and a “Jesus Loves Me” sale.

The exhibit isn’t called a show but an installation. White describes it as primitive art and says it is an artist talking to the people, rather than an artist talking to other artists, which is often the essence of abstract art.

In a re-created yard sale spread out on the floor and painted white, he masses about 100 of his weekend purchases into an intriguing display of both his talent and his sense of humor.

Somehow the statue of a discarded two-legged horse, a wrench, a broken doll, a bowling trophy, chipped glassware and a cardboard mailing tube sum up a portion of L.A. as well as anything ever has.

If that isn’t the San Fernando Valley on a Sunday afternoon, I’ll eat your mismatched pottery set.

The other end of the spectrum was contained in the Stephen Verona GWTW exhibit that same evening, proving we’re a little bit of everything in the town Raymond Chandler said had the personality of a paper cup.

We’re yard sale, and we’re show biz. We’re cutout representations of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, and we’re a baby’s used pink toilet seat for $1.25.

We’re a mural of Tara burning, and we’re the sweat-stained olive drab T-shirt said to have been worn by Loretta (Hot Lips) Switt in “MASH.”

We’re a woman in see-through lace and a guy with a paunch peddling used camper tires on the lawn of his Arleta home.

We’re glitz and garbage on a grand and sequined scale.

“You know,” I said to my wife later that evening, over a quiet drink at Manhattan West, “this town has possibilities.”

“You know, Martinez,” she said, touching the end of my nose, “you got a point.”

All the way home I thought about the half-naked woman and wondered if she had ever been to a yard sale. I mean yeard sale. I’d make book on it.