La Jolla Show Reveals David Hockney’s 2 Sides

David Hockney has long been a darling of the media, though factions within the art world have both scoffed and celebrated him. His sheer popularity and facile command of the fame game have made him suspect among art scholars--so much so that one of his biographers posed the question straightaway in his 1981 book on the artist: Is Hockney merely a “colorful personality” or a “committed artist?”

A current show of Hockney’s early drawings at the Thomas Babeor Gallery in La Jolla helps solve the identity problem--Hockney is both. He works with one foot in the door of popular illustration and the other in the headier realm of meaningful art. He is capable of poignant, profound statements, but he is equally likely to succumb to the soft and sentimental.

Most of the 20 drawings on view here possess an easily digestible charm, a coyness and sweetness that leaves no bitter aftertaste. They are glimpses from Hockney’s own visual diary of impressions--the subdued expression of a friend watching television, the view from a hotel window in Egypt, a still-life of the artist’s things on a table. Often they verge on a cartoon-like whimsy, but just as often they show the touch of an accomplished draftsman.

The pencil, colored pencil and pen-and-ink drawings in the Babeor show date from 1961, one year before the British-born Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, through 1972, when he already had been settled in Los Angeles for nine years.

His graduation from art school coincided with the emergence of British Pop Art, and Hockney’s stylish depiction of name-brand products or productions (such as the Gitanes cigarette box in one drawing here and the movie advertisement in another) may have taken cues from that movement. But Hockney’s work has generally been more autobiographical than the Pop vocabulary allows, and, as he flits around from abstraction to figuration, from tight, precise rendering to casual scribbles, he has lighted not only on Pop motifs but on Abstract Expressionist gestures and Art Brut outpourings of raw emotion.

“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” (1961), for instance, seems a relative of De Kooning’s grimacing creatures, wild and womanly, drawn with crude dashes of ink and perhaps a fair measure of hostility. “Two Toothy Smiles,” from the same year, feels less vicious. It, too, shows homely figures in unabashed confrontation with the viewer, but here Hockney has adopted a sense of faux naif charm, a childlike directness akin to Dubuffet.

Though most of Hockney’s drawings here are small in size and thematic scope, a few have the potential for weightier readings, and these are the images that salvage Hockney’s reputation from the hype heap. “Sitting Man With Bubble” (1964) is particularly moving. Here Hockney draws the profile of an older man in hesitant lines that repeat themselves with slight variation as if unable to commit himself to a specific contour. From the man’s mouth floats a cartoon bubble with a single letter inside. The W hovers there like the beginning of an unspoken question, as unfinished as the man himself.

Whether Hockney’s work is, on balance, more frivolous than substantive is not a question easily answered by this show. Certainly there are drawings at both extremes here, proving the artist to be, if nothing else, versatile.

Thomas Babeor Gallery, 7470 Girard Ave., La Jolla, through Dec . 21. Open Tuesday through Saturday 10-5:30.

Still-lifes cannot get more still than Kathleen Marshall’s. Her small, exacting images feel hushed, frozen, as if time were completely suspended. Marshall, who currently shares a show at the David Lewinson Gallery with fellow San Diegan Jim Skalman, signs her works with the exact dates spanning their execution, a notation that underscores the artist’s intense, concentrated effort.

Most of the gouache paintings in this show measure only a few inches in either direction, and most were made in Paris, where Marshall maintains a studio. You get what you see in these works, and the titles merely repeat the obvious subjects: “Two Figs,” “Yellow Apple,” “Vase and Mirror.”

Marshall has a fine sense of light and color, but her renderings of empty interiors are long on meticulous brushwork and short on mood. Even when golden light rakes across an empty folding chair, or when crisp light fills the glass of a mirror, these pictures fail to rack up much poignancy. They are like journal entries that describe but don’t divulge.

Marshall’s work is as direct as Skalman’s aims to be subversive. His “Side Pockets: Objects and Other Works” are 90% furniture design, 10% folly. Skalman surfaces all of his work with plastic laminate bearing a wood grain pattern, as if to declare, “I’m not what I seem to be.”

The table laying on its side, the armoire that opens inward and the lectern on its side are also not exactly what they seem. They are familiar, functional objects presented in a slightly skewed manner that strips them of their functions. Unfortunately, there is nothing beguiling about this transformation. The works yearn to be odd and disjunctive, but they are really quite plain. They have left the realm of furniture, but Skalman has not fully prodded them into the more entrancing realm of pure sculpture.

David Lewinson Gallery, Del Mar Plaza, 1555 Camino del Mar, through Dec. 1. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 11-9, Sunday 11-6.