SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : What’s Inside That Rock : ‘I call it transformation through forgiveness,’ Ventura sculptor says of her monumental work.

There he stands, all 12 vertical feet of him. In the lucid sunlight of autumn, his white head peers over a fence in the oil field area of Ventura.

Half man, half eagle, he is a stoic stationary figure amid the bobbing oil pumps that, like giant kinetic sculptures of preying mantises, seize and devour earthly resources. It’s as if “he” is gazing at the surroundings disapprovingly, a sentient sentinel.

His life began in a stone yard in Pietra Santa, Italy. It was there that Ventura sculptor Frances Jansen first spied the rock, and saw within it the figure-to-be. It was the first burst of inspiration in a long process that will lead her large sculpture to Wounded Knee, S.D., this winter, where it will be installed as a monument to the Indian massacre that occurred a century ago.

“I’ve only been carving for three years. I’m not an artist,” said Jansen, white marble dust flecking her eyebrows. A gentle wind was whipping through her sculpture yard last week as two assistants were finishing sanding the sculpture for last Sunday’s unofficial unveiling.

“When I see a rock, I get a vision of what’s inside that rock. For a split second, I see inside the rock. When I saw this rock, I almost started crying.”

Jansen has lived in the Ventura area for many years, and started the restaurant that is now Frankie’s in downtown Ventura. Before that, her life’s path took her from her native Holland to Australia, to Ojai, to Germany, and to Thailand during the Vietnam war, before she returned to Ventura County in the late ‘70s.

Since selling her restaurant, she has found expressive release in chipping at marble. “I had a boyfriend, an abstract sculptor, who used to tell me that artists were special, and that used to bug me. I think we all have creative energies.”

She went on to carve several figurative pieces--American Indians, angels, nudes.

Jansen took the reporter inside the shiny Airstream trailer in the yard to show photographs of the newly completed man/eagle’s original marble manifestation. Sure enough, the long, twisting stone bears a striking resemblance to the finished sculptural form. The rock--or “he,” as she is prone to call it--weighed nearly five tons when Jansen had it shipped to her yard in the oil fields almost two years ago.

Then came the process of unlocking the vision, chipping away at him. “I don’t draw before working on a piece,” Jansen said. “I knew there was an Indian in there.” According to the artist, it was then a matter of finding him, of probing the rock, asking “where are you?”

In the finished product, the smooth rippling sinew of the man contrasts with the raked texture of feathers on the opposite side. An eagle’s headdress may or may not be the ultimate result of the man’s metamorphosis. “I call it transformation through forgiveness,” she said. “It’s about man’s transformation to his higher being.”

After finishing the work three months ago, a friend proposed the idea of sending the sculpture to Wounded Knee. Jensen dashed off a letter to the Wounded Knee Survivor’s Assn., explaining, “I felt that I had been guided by a higher force . . . in the acknowledgment of their great loss.”

Her proposal was greeted favorably by the Lakota Sioux and in commemoration of the slaughter, the sculpture will stand where now exists only a small marble pillar.

She hopes to have it officially unveiled in December, on the 101st anniversary of the massacre in which 300 Sioux were killed. Much as the piece smacks of New Age aesthetics, the cause could hardly be more deserving.

Before shipping the sculpture off to South Dakota, a cast will be made and six bronzes made. Jansen also hopes to initiate a fund-raising project to build a museum at Wounded Knee.

“There’s a desire to blow the bugle,” she said, then, covering her mouth with a dust mask, she was back to the task of making “his” muscles gleam.

MORE ANIMAL ENERGY:

Anthropomorphic imagery of a completely different sort can be seen at Oxnard’s Portside Gallery, where Ursula Bayer’s raw, exciting neoexpressionist paintings and works on paper hang. Cat women, primordial-looking creatures, impressions of the Lucifer of legend, and other unsentimental sights abound in Bayer’s gallery of ghouls.

Bayer, German by birth and Londoner by residence, has shown her work on the Continent, but this is her first show in the States. Her work clearly descends from German expressionism of old, in its urgent but distorted figuration.

Bayer’s imagination dwells on the human/animal borderline, freely fusing species. The impression of a blue horse alongside an outline of a nude woman recalls the Expressionist Franz Marc’s equestrian dreams.

Colors are vivid, but not so much cheerful as seething, like feverish dreams of mutating beasts and liquid, amorphous forms. Throughout the gallery, we see disembodied eyes, cat-like and almond-shaped, and exaggerated, pointy breasts. On one wall, several close-up facial portraits--viewed as a series--depict the anatomy of psychic unraveling, as the facial features retreat further and further into some disquieting ether.

In one specific reference, Lady Liberty is blindfolded and wears a crown of thorns. In another painting, two lovers bodies melt into a fleshy mass, with the immortal words “I Love You” floating between them. All is not lost in a morass of Angst.

While the Portside Gallery is off the beaten path, in an industrial area south of downtown Oxnard, it’s an artspace worth checking out. On a recent afternoon, owner Michael Racine was working on a fiberglass project in the copious workroom downstairs, but the gallery space upstairs, with windows looking over the wide open spaces of Oxnard farmland, had an eerie stillness.

Bayer’s work seizes the air here, and refuses to coddle the viewer into idle reflection. Her art exudes a kind of nervous electricity that tickles the unconscious, or maybe rubs it a bit raw.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Paintings and works on paper by Ursula Bayer at Portside Gallery, 1657 Pacific Ave. Unit 48, in Oxnard.