O.C. ART : Brady, Brandriff Shape Images of Inner Agony

Think of all the upbeat, outgoing, socially adept artists you’ve ever heard of--the folks who’d probably bore a psychiatrist silly with tales of a happy childhood and expressions of unbounded love for humankind. Whatever short list you come up with, it isn’t likely to include Robert Brady and George Kennedy Brandriff, the two artists showing at the Laguna Art Museum.

Brady, whose ceramics from the past 15 years are on view through Jan. 28, imbues his masks and figures with tensions and deformities that stem in part from the insecurities of his own life. Brandriff’s allegorical still lifes from 1931-32, on view through Jan. 21, were vehicles for him to vent his disgust with New Dealers, Commies, art critics, marriage and other fearful blots on the good life. Four years later he was dead--a suicide at 46.

Brady was born in 1946 in Reno, Nev., where his ne’er-do-well father was a casino pit boss and his mother worked as a waitress and supermarket clerk. They married and divorced twice while the family kept on the move, accumulating more than 20 addresses. When the artist was 10, he and his mother fled the house where they were living with husband No. 2, leaving all their possessions behind.

In his junior year of high school Brady developed Reiter’s Syndrome, a chronic disease that inflames the joints of the body. Bedridden for months, he had to figure out a way to graduate with his class. Crafts seemed an easy way of adding credits, and he became entranced with ceramics.

For him, as he wrote later, working in clay was “a private activity and a territorial one. It was my own ritual and communication with something.”

Important influences on his work included sculpture of far-flung cultures--in New Guinea, Africa, Mexico--as well as the aggressively physical style of vessel making pioneered by Peter Voulkos in the late 1950s. His cracked, bulging, ripped, paint-attacked pieces are vastly different from the polite pots of traditional Western ceramics.

After a few more years of experimentation, Brady was making work such as the giant puff-sleeved, multicolored “Blouse,” fashioned from two layers of ceramic rod grids. It is a witty piece in an impersonal style that another, more conceptually motivated artist might have been content to pursue happily for years.

But in the twisted, battered ceramic figures Brady began making in the late ‘70s, he finally found the expressive language he needed. Typically, these figures have long, spindly legs pressed together and bent at the knees, as if bound with invisible shackles. Some of the figures have skinny long arms that curve upward, as if in hopes of salvation; others have missing or cruelly stunted arms.

Huge, bloated heads (some look like upside-down pots) are jammed down rudely on frail chests, and facial features are irregularly picked out with dice, buttons, a shaving brush. Exposed sexual organs look tender and vulnerable.

Painfully unadorned--at once reminiscent of children’s art, ancient Cycladic art and even, perhaps, some medieval Crucifixions--the best of these pieces are intensely personal vehicles for the agonies of body and soul. They achieve a high seriousness rare in ceramic art.

On the other hand, most of Brady’s small, masklike heads are rather whimsical creations. Studded with all manner of objects, from pencil “fangs” to preposterous speckled “carbuncles,” these pieces seem more self-consciously stylized than expressive.

In recent years Brady has had some difficulty keeping his larger figures from reflecting the spurious kind of pathos that sells knickknacks and greeting cards. Some of the animal images--such as “Eva,” an antlered creature whose body swells on one side to shield four timid-looking creatures that grow out of her back--could strike one as too one-dimensional, too cloyingly “sensitive.”

At the same time, his human figures from the past few years often seem disappointingly formulaic and bland. Leaning on Tinkertoy-like structures, or standing with lumpish long legs on concrete slabs, they seem to be trying too hard to be “meaningful.”

A massive chair form with no seat (“Piedmont”) and a group of 5-foot-tall pieces that combine features of both vessels and human figures are the most recent works in the show. They suggest that Brady continues to seek new ways of imbuing his chosen medium with complex and deeply felt meaning. Perhaps that artistic restlessness is the positive legacy of his nomadic early years.

Brandriff is somewhat more of a puzzle. A dentist who painted California plein air landscapes in his free time, he gave up his Los Angeles practice and moved to Laguna Beach in 1930. He had just returned from a protracted art-viewing trip to Europe with his wife, and apparently was happy and eager to live the artist’s life.

At last perfectly situated to turn out more images of surf and shore, he perversely turned to the indoor art of still life painting. At first, the images seemed lighthearted: In “Sunday Breakfast,” he painted newspaper comic pages propped up next to the tomato juice on his breakfast table. But 1931 brought a darker tone--both literally and figuratively--to Brandriff’s art.

Framed with collages of newspaper headlines (now lost), these works were one bitter man’s response to the news of the day.

In “Ebb-Flow,” two dolls in peasant dress stand on a map of North America, towering above a fallen statue of Napoleon, two miniature soldiers and a book titled “Europe Since 1850.” As curator Bolton Colburn writes in an accompanying essay, the painting “plays on fears of a Communist takeover” of the United States.

In “Hit Me,” a game of blackjack is in progress between a ball-bottomed clown toy and an unseen opponent who has amassed many more chips. The clown stares in dumb glee, ready to be hit off-balance in a literal sense as well as by what may be the final hand of the game. Former Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier interpreted this work as a jab against the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt.

In other paintings Brandriff tangles with subjects such as art criticism (a tiny artist squashed against his palette by a huge thumb), matrimony (a nude blonde doll with a veil claps her hand over an armless boy doll’s mouth), and suicide itself (a man lies on the floor near a flung-away gun). A carved plaster monkey owned by the artist can be seen in many of these little tableaux, surveying the scene like an omniscient Greek chorus.

Seen individually, the still lifes are tantalizing attention-grabbers. But as a group, they come across as cranky one-liners. Strip away the hectoring message underneath the “allegory” and there is precious little to occupy the viewer.

In the end, the paintings seem more like footnotes to the life of a despairing artist. The retreat he had carved out for himself in peaceful Southern California was threatened daily by the winds of political change. The big world of art he discovered during his European sojourn proved to contain masterful works that far surpassed the unambitious output of local artists.

Brandriff’s own place in the great scheme of things might have begun to seem increasingly insecure. And apparently he was also very ill. In his painting “Futility,” a bloody thermometer lies alongside the fallen rose petals, gin bottle and other objects.

So, as if following the lead of Richard Cory, the seemingly well-adjusted loner in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem--one fine day Brandriff “went home and put a bullet through his head.”

“Robert Brady: A Survey Exhibition” (through Jan. 28) and “The Allegorical Still Lifes of George Kennedy Brandriff” (through Jan. 21) are at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. General admission is $2, seniors and students $1. Information: (714) 494-6531.