Portrait of a Society Painter : Lifestyle: Like many an artist, Julian La Trobe is searching out all the Right People at all the Right Parties.

Portraits of the rich and powerful are proof that both the sitter and the artist have arrived.

Artist Julian La Trobe would like Angelenos to know he has arrived--from San Francisco, where for five years he has been painting portraits of that city’s elite society crowd.

Now, seeking to stretch his reputation south, he has rented an apartment in Hollywood--a 1920s-vintage domicile near the Hollywood Bowl--with barrel vaulted ceilings and a secret passageway that leads up to a tower. He has been painting a nighttime sky with stars on his bedroom ceiling. The bathroom will have a morning sky.

And he is engaged in meeting the right people, those he hopes will commission portraits.

“It’s scary,” he admits. “To come down here and . . . be plopped in the middle of a fabulous party where you don’t know a soul, that’s a little intimidating. I haven’t had to do that in about two or three years. So at parties I just have eight hands out, I’m like an octopus, shaking hands and smiling and laughing and having a wonderful time. I really like the people down here. I think they’re fun and exciting and doing things, which is a little different from up there, where you have a lot of people living off of old funds.”

He’s especially fascinated by the relentless drive of those high on the food chain in the movie business. “That would make a great portrait,” he says, “that intensity.”

If it’s intensity he’s looking for, it’s suggested that he might want to look up Creative Artists Agency super agent Michael Ovitz.

“Ahhh. Michael Lovis,” he says.

That’s Ovitz .

“Ovitz. Michael Ovitz. I’ll remember that.”

Forgive him his unfamiliarity with the powers that be, for La Trobe has barely scratched the surface of Los Angeles society. But it’s destined to be his bread and butter if he is going to make a name for himself here by painting the city’s rich and famous.

He was recently nudged out of his Pacific Heights apartment and pointed south by two friends: Los Angeles artist Tony Duquette and interior designer Hutton Wilkinson. They are introducing him to the Right Kind of People at the Right Kind of Parties, like philanthropist Frances Brody, whose home La Trobe has already rendered on canvas.

There’s nothing unusual about La Trobe wanting to schmooze in the L.A. social scene; artists--including the late master schmoozer, Andy Warhol--have been doing it for decades.

“Artists have always (worked the party circuit),” says local artist Annie Kelly, who met La Trobe through Wilkinson. “Very few don’t. Most artists are making the rounds.”

The 27-year-old La Trobe--whose flamboyant manner was described by one acquaintance as “gently swashbuckling”--very much wants to make it here.

“I love society people,” he says. “I guess I know that they’re real. I never think about who they are and what they are, it’s just your eyes and my eyes, and us communicating. The other stuff--what they have--never gets in between.”

Money doesn’t impress him?

“Absolutely not. It’s a must for the business, but no, not really. If somebody walked into a party and I didn’t know her, and somebody told me she had $600 million she’s dying to spend, the first thing that goes through my mind is, ‘Let’s do a portrait.’ ”

But there’s a fine line between making nice with rich people and being an oozy sycophant, and La Trobe is careful not to cross it.

“I know that on the one or two occasions when somebody wanted something out of me, and they were being nice to me for it, I could tell. It just bothered me. Hopefully I never seem that way.”

What helped start his career in San Francisco, says La Trobe, was falling in with “the right people”--not society types, but the antique dealers, architects and interior designers who could introduce him to their clients.

“The wealthy people don’t make a move without their OK,” he explains.

Before San Francisco he had been living in Europe; first Rome, where he painted, then Venice, where he worked for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, entertaining rich American tourists whom the Guggenheim was wooing for funds.

He embarked for Europe after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Reared by British parents in Memphis, Tenn., who encouraged his artistic inclinations, he always felt a bit like an expatriate, and thought he might be more comfortable living in Italy.

But that didn’t suit him either, so he moved to San Francisco.

“I’m always looking in a sort of Fellini-esque way at the scene,” he says. “Always. Always. And never passing judgment, but just, boy, this is straight out of a movie. Look how birds of a feather flock over there, or there’s the queen bee over there. I just loooooove that, I love that. I love it visually too.

“And even though I am sort of going around (meeting people) and trying to get business,” La Trobe explains, “I think everyone at the party is doing it, whether you’re an investment banker or you have a film to produce, you’re meeting the people you should be meeting. I think everybody’s at the party for some reason other than purely just to be there and have a good time.”

John Mariani, a wealthy Los Altos businessman who is among La Trobe’s clients, says the artist fits in quite nicely among the social crowd there. “He disarms them completely. A little red flag goes up when someone is a little too grand; there are so many fake grand people who make it somewhere else and come to San Francisco to be grand. He is exactly what he is. Julian goes through society as if he’s going through a sieve: effortlessly. The only thing he leaves behind are his brush marks.”

Mariani bought a La Trobe painting at a San Francisco antique store years ago as an anniversary gift for his wife, but met the artist some time later.

“He came to my apartment on Nob Hill about two years ago. I didn’t know who he was. He walked in and said, ‘I’d love to paint your apartment.’ I knew it needed a paint job, but I didn’t know anyone could be so bold. So the next morning he arrives wearing a hair band, a white painter’s smock with black polka dots and shorts. He looked like a go-go girl from the ‘60s. And I said, ‘I really don’t want my apartment painted.’ Then I saw what kind of paints he had and finally realized who he was and all that. So I told him to come in and went back to bed and told him to paint whatever he wanted.”

What he ended up painting was a portrait of Mariani--sound asleep in bed. Subsequent canvases were filled with Mariani at the piano wearing silk pajamas and Mariani at a small dinner party.

“I told him he’d have to clear out for dinner,” Mariani recalls, “and he asked if he could paint me at dinner. In San Francisco you’re always looking for a way to warm people up, and it became sort of the talk of the town that we were painted at dinner. Very decadent.”

Capturing home interiors on canvas may seem odd to those unfamiliar with the tradition, popular among the wealthy in the 19th Century. Although portraits are La Trobe’s first love, he started doing interiors a couple of years ago. Interiors start at $2,000, portraits at $5,000.

He explains: “A lot of people I work with have several houses, and they like the idea of having a painting of one in the other, and vice versa. Why? Because they made it, they created it. Whether they did it with a decorator or they did it themselves, there’s so little creativity out there that is available.”

San Francisco interior designer Andrew Fisher and wife Katherine McGuire recently commissioned La Trobe to do separate portraits; he also did a painting of their garden and bedroom.

“His interiors show much more creativity than a photograph,” says Fisher. “Plus, you can tell lies here and there--make things a few feet taller, make everything look prettier. . . . It’s also interesting to see how the artist perceives how you live.”

La Trobe says he is fortunate that most of the interiors appeal to his taste. Occasionally they don’t, as with a recent home he painted which he describes in a whisper as “ ‘60s motel.”

A few of his peers are quick to denigrate his work, calling his paintings “potboilers.” “They say, ‘Are you still doing your potboilers?’ meaning, are you still doing what you have to do? I keep telling them, ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am with what I’m doing. It’s so rewarding for me, and I honestly don’t see that you’re a bastion of happiness.’ But it’s not their fault,” he sighs. “It’s where art has gone . . . I have the facility to get my point across, but they probably think that I’m not searching.”

He showed in few galleries in San Francisco; none seemed to be the vehicle for his work. Years ago, he was scheduled to mount an exhibition with Duquette, but the building burned days before the show was to go up. Thus, he’s never been reviewed.

Duquette says that finding an L.A. gallery to exhibit La Trobe’s work is among the first orders of business once the artist is settled.

“I think he’ll start to be known through exhibitions,” Duquette says. “This is such an enormous area. . . . In my time, there were really only three society groups: Hollywood, Pasadena and Hancock Park. Now there are 30 or 40 factions. I don’t think he can be introduced to a group that would put him on the map, but you can be introduced to a city that can.”

La Trobe mulls this over and says, “The problem is that we haven’t seen any galleries that are quite right. It would be ideal to get a gallery, but somebody with my sensibility is difficult to come by. I haven’t seen anything. In the meantime, until we find something, I’ll continue on getting through society.”