Santa Monica

Anyone who’s been around Los Angeles knows the diva of expert draftsmanship, Joyce Treiman. With nearly 40 years of art making and two L.A. retrospectives under her belt, Treiman has shown herself to be a spunky and diverse local icon, riding roughshod through painting and sculpture, still life, landscape and portraiture with a stunning and maverick kind of grace. Her strangely beautiful individualism comes from absorbing, transforming and then ultimately doing away with her art historical antecedents. That trademark is alive and well in a show of large paintings, drawings and charming acrylic images executed on manufactured vases.

With few exceptions, most of these works are self-portraits by an artist confident enough to use her own image as a springboard for formal and philosophical ruminations that never seem narcissistic or self-absorbed. There’s lighthearted verve to works, even those that appear to comment on the rarefied realm of art.

The show’s frontispiece is a grand canvas. A loose but stunningly rendered horse rears under a cartoon perfect sky. From the hazy dust the animal kicks up, emerges its forceful rider in chaps and Stetson perched atop a beautifully worked self-portrait complete with the tuft of carrot red hair and small penetrating eyes that are Treiman’s calling cards. Beside steed and rider is a toppled classical bust formed from thick, dime-store pink highlights and looking like it’s intended to play Goliath to Treiman’s David. In this painting and in nearly every drawing, we see Treiman’s mastery of her media and the lovably perverse twinkle in the eye of a seasoned artist that knows her craft well enough to flow with it and knows life well enough to find in it humor and play. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to Dec. 30.)