ART : Shows by Strong Young Artists, Oldies Break the Drought : Offerings at Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman College, Orange Coast College Art Gallery and galleries in Laguna Beach and Newport Beach offer a range of techniques.

The winter art drought is letting up here and there, with shows of work by strong younger artists from Southern California and a group of golden (and not-so-golden) oldies from the ‘60s.

Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman College is awash in an outpouring of paintings and mixed-media constructions by a young Philippine artist, Manuel Ocampo, who now lives in Los Angeles. His bizarrely apropos art background consists of drawing cartoons for an underground newspaper and copying religious paintings for the Roman Catholic Church.

Although reminiscent at times of the folkloric simplicity and outspoken personal anguish associated with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, his art is really a different kind of animal. Brash and nervy, it mingles the outer shell of passion with a cool, self-conscious inventiveness that shamelessly borrows from the history of Western political, religious and avant-garde art. Ocampo’s central theme is the Philippines’ pervasive lack of self-definition, as the only country in Southeast Asia that became subject to Western colonialism before it had developed its own centralized government or advanced culture.

His images are paintings of imaginary bloody martyrs and violent events, mock posters invoking a call to action or an outpouring of despair, still lifes suffused with religious imagery and three-dimensional constructions that suggest the sorry residue of fantasized scenes of defiance.

These pieces, produced in a bewildering variety of styles, offer a grab bag of cathartic ways of coming to terms with the bottled up emotions of a people who experienced 333 years of Spanish rule, 48 years of U.S. government, more than two decades of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos and an ongoing American military presence. Many of the works are spuriously dated--1917, 1948, 1981--to reinforce the fictive sense of a shared history of personal involvement in the country’s direction.

Some of Ocampo’s pieces include swastikas, which--along with the gruesomeness of some of the imagery--reportedly have upset some gallery visitors. But the swastikas clearly are meant as emblems of oppression, and the bloody scenes reflect Catholic folk tradition, political struggle and--seemingly--self-inflicted psychological wounds.

At Orange Coast College Art Gallery in Costa Mesa, meticulously painted images on coolly well-proportioned ceramic sculptures of female figures by Barbara Dorris are meditations on the mysteries of internal physical experience--most vividly, the process of conception and the ravaging of the body by disease.

On the cross-section of a woman’s torso, a pair of hands perform legerdemain with an egg and a towel enclosing a small flame. Deer run down the side of one hip. These delicately allusive metaphoric images conjure up both physical event and bodily sensation: the initial creation of life and the movements of a fetus in the womb.

In “The Visitation,” the figure is a bust-length woman’s figure, sheared off at one shoulder. Painted in luminous, matter-of-fact detail on the surface of this cross-section are two large green and orange bugs crawling over a lump of earth on clean red flagstones just beyond a closed white door. The juxtaposition of the well-manicured threshold of a house--a bastion of security and orderliness--with the quietly persistent rhythms of insect life offers a vivid image for the doggedly invasive force of cancer.

A rain of fire falling on an umbrella blown inside-out and ringed with burning tapers (“Dermis”) is a metaphor for the resilient--but thin and infinitely sensitive--layers of human skin. The vertically amputated torso figure on which this image is painted lists slightly to one side, as if mirroring the vulnerability of the human body. For Dorris--long in possession of an effortless technique but in search of meaningful subject matter--this series marks a personal breakthrough in its exquisitely empathic treatment of the body.

A pair of low-key meditations on ecological themes by Cynthia Kastan and Mary Linn Hughes sit comfortably under the umbrella, “The Nature of Things,” at BC Space in Laguna Beach.

Kastan takes black-and-white aerial photographs of sprawling landscapes in various U.S. locations and turns them into photo-silk screens, printed off-register (to create a sense of depth) and overlaid with brightly colored lines and squiggles.

In the manner of ancient South American earthworks, these patterns turn the contours of rivers, valleys and plains into the outlines of grandly scaled images and vignettes: a fish, a face, a fanciful creature chasing an antelope. The suggestion is that the distance of long-range contemplation reveals a spiritual presence that still inhabits our much-beleaguered natural resources.

The margins of some of these pieces also include images of a broad range of human and animal life. In “Facets: Stretch,” photographs of film actors, a bare-chested masked performer, acrobatic monkeys, a creeping lizard and a forward-lurching dinosaur skeleton seem to be engaged in a global demonstration of the word stretch , as if to indicate the ties that bind the kingdom of the animals. It’s a worthy idea, and yet one wants the piece to reveal a more intricate and sophisticated visual syntax that goes beyond a simple system of equivalences.

Hughes’ untitled installation soothes the senses immediately, with sounds of running water and an atmospheric scattering of sharply scented eucalyptus leaves on the floor. Crunching through them, the viewer passes an invitingly touchable plot of grass, circles a heaped cord of wood in the center of the gallery, spots a hanging stuffed bird and a motto framed in chicken bones, and finally reads a message chalked across a wall. The message--which invokes a list of famous dead people whose molecules are still circulating in the universe--asks the viewer to consider that “no life is isolated from other life.”

There are some problems here. Moralizing or lecturing to the viewer is usually a sure way for a work of art to commit hara-kiri. The stuffed bird adds an unwanted reminder of cliched wildlife art and the bone-framed sentiment (“There is no way around the fact that we are involved with each other”) is embarrassingly over-earnest and redundant. And yet, Hughes has softened and seduced the viewer with her tactile, aromatic evocation of the natural world. This piece has an undeniable charm, and its simple but grandly significant message lingers compellingly in the mind.

LJB Gallery in Newport Beach is walking down memory lane with a bunch of paintings and other pieces by some fondly remembered figures from California art of the swinging ‘60s, courtesy of Jackie Stuart, the widow of Los Angeles gallery owner David Stuart. Although much of the work seems to have been chosen with the flighty tastes of Orange County in mind, and some notable names are represented by so-so work, there are a few treats here.

Most generously served is Robert Dowd, whose loopy, wildly oversize paintings of American folding money linger lovingly on the ornate seals, the patterned intricacies of steel engraving and numismatists’ dreams of finding valuable printing errors. Not to mention Dowd’s fantasies--to contemporary eyes, all-too-prescient--of a conflation of greenbacks and art, as in “Picasso Dollar,” in which a Picassoid woman’s head replaces George Washington’s.

Llyn Foulkes--like Dowd, an artist whose work was included in Newport Harbor Art Museum’s “L.A. Pop in the ‘60s” exhibition last year--also comes on strong. One of his oddly anthropomorphic landscapes, “Ercha’s Rock,” a large image of a craggy outcropping, is paired with a handwritten fragment of prose (“The rock hung without the man”). The painted frame reinforces the sense that this work is a self-conscious artifact of the imagination--a grand, semi-serious parody of the tradition of the Western novel.

John Altoon’s untitled watercolor of three figures offers his inimitable serendipitous way with jabs, scribbles and rushes of color. Lumbering and delicate forms nudge each other in teasing ways, and the color has a joyous, springtime feel. William Copley’s all-over patterns of tiny figures and jokey tete-a-tete (“Now No”) still retain a happy-go-lucky appeal.

But nothing else really sings any more. James Strombotne’s paintings look glum and awkward. The Peter Voulkos pieces are small and tame, compared to the wild, galumphing works that set the hitherto tame world of ceramics on its ear. Hassel Smith has done many more striking abstract paintings. Could we ever have found any substance in Mel Ramos’ airbrushed cuties? Did anyone ever take Laurence Dreiband’s male fantasies of teenie-boppers seriously? What a long time ago it was.

Work by Manuel Ocampo remains through April 22 at Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman College, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Information: (714) 997-6729. Work by Barbara Dorris remains through May 9 at the Orange Coast College College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday . The gallery is closed for spring recess April 9 through 14. Information: (714) 422-5039.

“The Nature of Things” remains through April 28 at BC Space, 235 Forest Ave. in Laguna Beach. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Information: (714) 497-1880. “The ‘60s David Stuart Collection” remains through May 5 at LJB Gallery, 359 San Miguel Drive, Newport Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Information: (714) 720-0133. Admission to all these galleries is free.