Santa Monica

John Rose can paint calm seas at sunset so that they seem both impossible and real. Water in these paintings isn’t liquid, it’s more an opaque glass or polished stone perpetually rippling toward smooth shores and round hills. Timeless and solitary to the point of being chilling, their immutability is best caught in a couple of the “Shadows Live and Vanish Series” where blue-black images breath with an arctic freeze.

Piercing the frozen perfection of the sea and land are a couple of knife-sharp, wide obelisks bisected vertically by the vivid brightness of an orange dawn. Strangely empty, their geometry cuts like a door into deep space suggesting the monolith from “2001” or an inhospitable ice hut on a frozen lake. In another painting, one nearby obelisk is replaced by a rock, a strangely disorienting switch that seems to have something to do with a change of the light and calls into question the reality of whatever is perceived.

If Rose’s seascapes are solid, his watercolor skies in the “L.A. Thunderstorm Series” are pure liquid. His wet into wet technique fits the dark turbulence of cumulous clouds and makes rain an inky wash falling out of bright-yellow skies. Improbable but delightfully poetic. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 11).