Old Painter With Refreshing Vision Trains His Eye on the Ties That Bind

A plucky independence guides the brush of Jon Serl, just as it commands his speech, his habits and his home. Nearly a century old, Serl lives in a rambling house in Lake Elsinore, but in the world his mind inhabits, recollections mingle with current affairs, human and animal realms overlap, and situations and characters from his past saunter before his eyes in search of resolution.

The Oneiros Gallery downtown (711 8th Ave.) is holding its second show of Serl’s work, through Dec. 8. Resisting a clean chronology like the plague, Serl’s paintings seem to hover in a timeless continuum, anchored not to specific places and dates but to incidents from the artist’s memory and imagination.

An “outsider” to the mainstream art world, he has been driven more by instinct than ambition, following no conscious course but consistently kneading together the childlike and the wise. This selection of paintings, which spans 20 years, exudes the characteristic charm of Serl’s vision. Serl flaunts his freedom, unlocking the joints of his figures’ arms and legs, abandoning their bodies’ natural symmetries and stretching their skins to fantastic proportions. In “My Husband Wants to Fly,” a stolid-faced woman engages in a vague domestic chore while her free-spirited mate floats blithely behind her. In white from top to bottom, his one, wing-like arm surrounds the woman’s numb expression with the aura of possibility and whimsy that she clearly lacks.

The broad spectrum of factors that binds individuals in relationships intrigues Serl, and he examines these forces with frequency. He visualizes these phenomena with humor and refreshing directness, showing couples united by practical need (“Mooching a Ride”) and physical attraction (“In the Oil Fields”), mutual bliss (“Happy People”) and tempestuous anger (“Break in the Honeymoon”).

Serl’s paintings depict states of being more often than distinct individuals, but occasionally a particular character emerges and assumes a tangible, arresting presence. In last year’s show, the star was “Elfrieda,” a gentle beauty holding a fertile vine. This time, an “Irish Serving Girl” stands watch over the show, her piercing emerald eyes wielding a disarming power. Her cream-colored skin has none of the sensuousness of Elfrieda’s, but instead appears pasty and pale. She holds herself stiffly upright, neither the jaunty green hat on her head nor the dachshund in her arms breaking the stern spell she casts upon her viewer.

The immediacy of Serl’s brushwork, together with the freshness of his vision, imbue his work with a richness rarely encountered in contemporary painting. Accessible and insightful, Serl’s work crystallizes often familiar emotions. Both his style and his 90-odd years convince us that, for Serl, these emotions are never contrived but always genuinely felt.

David Baze, a local painter whose work is on view at Grossmont College’s Hyde Gallery through Dec. 7, also favors the episodic, the tableau vivant snatched from life and resonant of a larger meaning. Unlike Serl, candid and intuitive, Baze regards the canvas as a stage for self-conscious artifice, especially in his paintings from the 1970s. The actors in these scenes converge from vastly different plays, however, and their reason for meeting is rarely divulged.

Two elegantly dressed gallery-goers meet a pistol-wielding cowgirl in one image, while in another, a ceramic cookie jar is passed from a security guard to a young woman, both standing in front of a Frank Stella painting.

References to contemporary art and art history recur in nearly all of Baze’s work from the ‘70s, but to different ends. In one scene, a familiar painting serves as a prop, while in another, it echoes the live situation before it. Baze gives a knowing wink to art history in “Supper at My House” (1976), a remake of Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus,” thought to be painted in the 1590s.

Caravaggio’s version of the traditional theme represents the moment Christ reveals himself to the two apostles who have invited him to share their supper. Baze divests the scene of any religious significance but retains an astonishing subject. The young men and women gathered around this casual table marvel at a levitating plastic doll. Baze gives the doll an unearthly glow, making it the sole source of light in the otherwise dark painting. This homage to Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting techniques fills the painting with mystery and life, two qualities missing from the other work from the ‘70s, which is dominated by pallid wax figures in airless surrounds.

The Hyde Gallery show presents a group of paintings from 1975-79 and another from 1984 to the present, with no work from the intervening lapse. That span, whatever it held, had a liberating effect on Baze’s style, for the ‘80s work is looser, more subtle and evocative than anything that came before. Many of these paintings have been shown locally in recent years (at Southwestern College and USIU), but their pared-down dramas remain rich and ambiguous.

Baze strips the scenes in his recent paintings of any telling context and concentrates on the postures or discordant pairings of figures to convey meaning. His “Tony and Riva” (1987) pictures a discomfiting marriage of the trivial and the traumatic. One figure is suited up and armed for battle while the other is absorbed in a TV game show. Baze contrives other psychological tableaux from simpler means--a woman curled on a lounge chair, a man crouching before a light, a self-portrait with a flying bird. While the earlier works fail by making even the quixotic look mundane, these succeed by doing the reverse and making even the mundane appear quixotic.