Santa Monica

You can imagine Hank Pitcher’s admirers as folks who would like to buy Eucalyptus School California landscapes but can’t afford them. The Santa Barbara painter brings back the hills and big old trees and blue skies and aloe plants in a clear, bland style that could date from just about any time in this century.

The one howler is “Figure in the Landscape,” which features an athletic nude who seems to be made of wax or margarine. This pin-up calendar temptress stands with arms akimbo next to a patch of phallic, spiky-edged plants. Otherwise all is serene and smoothly painted in a perky, generalized way. Despite an over-reliance on hackneyed sunset themes, a group of smaller oil studies on paper offer a somewhat looser, more personal approach to the task of applying paint to a surface. (Tatistcheff Gallery, Inc., 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to Nov. 4)--C.C.

Of mixed Indian and American descent, figurative painter Fritz Scholder has spent a couple of decades carving a high visibility career with paintings of bold, pensive American Indians painted in strident colors and graphic contours. His now-familiar work is in the same sketchy yet schooled style as Nathan Oliveira with whom Scholder studied.

The artist has said that our society is in sore need of art and magic. Works on view exchange the specifics of his Indian heritage for haunting, faceless images that look like universal shamans. Several paintings feature a chiseled figure of unspecified gender whose strong nude body is encased in the suggestion of unfurling bat wings. Several other smaller works feature figures crouching in wicker chairs wrapped and coiled in blankets like gestating cocoons.

Scholder’s easy to swallow realism is included in just about every major museum collection and is a huge commercial success. Detractors cry “trendiness,” but these works have an exoticism and urgency which indicate an artist painting not solely for commerce. (Marilyn Butler Gallery, 910 Colorado Blvd. to Nov. 11).