La Cienega Area

John Nava always seems to be setting out to achieve noble goals in his paintings; trouble is, his ever-so-high-minded themes rarely seem to be borne out in the work. The latest group is mostly of well-proportioned young women, alone or in pairs, who wear modest bathing suits and stand on the beach, averting their faces to look down or gaze out to sea. Each image is primarily in a single tonality--pale yellow, pink or blue--with a peculiarly invasive under-layer of collaged torn papers. The figures, drawn with surgical precision, are mere ciphers, innocent of psychological depth.

In a statement, Nava grandly invokes “the static, silent and pale world” of painters Piero della Francesca, Georges Seurat and Giorgio Morandi. But no degree of stasis or paleness--and surely no pathetic attempts at re-creating the texture of fresco with collaged paper--seem likely to add stature to his images. They are excellent examples of academic rendering, but they contain not a whit of the “spiritual gravity” Nava so wistfully seeks to recapture.

Barrie Mottishaw has been working on small watercolors of cloud formations, painted from observation on successive days in Southern California. Arranged chronologically on the wall in grid formats, two on a sheet, the images vary from plausible transcriptions of cirrus and thunderheads to wishy-washy brushings of watery blue paint.

The famous predecessors of such meteorological data are, of course, John Constable’s cloud studies. Indeed, Mottishaw dedicates her series to fellow 19th-Century painter and art critic John Ruskin, who forcefully argued for careful observation of nature. But an artist who trots out such nakedly ingenuous observation-for-observation’s sake does so at her peril in the late 20th Century. Lacking a theoretical basis, the work comes across as little more than energetically motivated busy-work. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Dec. 30.)