Artist Indulges Urban Fixation : Exhibit: Michael Lindenmeyer blends stark reality with playfulness in his “Inner City Series” of watercolors and pastels. He says that cities may be rotting, but “they are still great to look at.”

Artist Michael Lindenmeyer spends most of his time on the outskirts of the city, more comfortable with the suburban hills and trees around his home in La Crescenta than the concrete and shadow of downtown Los Angeles.

And yet the raw details of the inner city--the twisted, abandoned cars, the smashed windows, the brick walls and alleyways, the homeless--began to fascinate him when he first arrived from Oregon seven years ago. This interest has manifested itself in his “Inner City Series,” an exhibition of sometimes grim, sometimes playful watercolors and pastels that continue at the McGroarty Arts Center in Tujunga through March 7.

“The cities are fabulous,” Lindenmeyer said last week. “It’s getting more dangerous, obviously. And I think the cities are rotting at the core. But they are still great to look at.”

The paintings, scattered throughout the two-level center, offer colorful scenes that mix elements from the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere. The works are composites of city life, he explained, culled from his collection of sketches created over the years. “It is less important that it’s a particular city” depicted in the works, he added.

In one painting, a homeless man rummages through a dumpster labeled “Rhino Lunch Box.” In another, a man lies bleeding in an alley, after a police shooting, under a sign reading “Forbidden City.”

“The juxtaposition of the words are also an important part of the statement, and you don’t see it at first,” said Joan deBruin, director of the McGroarty Art Center.

“He plays Americana and wholesomeness against the inner-city life that people are forced to live in order to survive,” deBruin added. She likened the images to what she witnessed while riding on a friend’s motor-scooter through early-morning downtown Los Angeles. “It was almost like a surrealistic landscape.”

Last week’s opening was the first time that Lindenmeyer, 41, had seen all the paintings displayed together in one room. Most of the paintings were created between winter 1990 and fall 1991 in his “troll cave,” a basement studio he shares in the hills overlooking downtown.

The self-taught artist said he decided to depict the city mainly in watercolors because that medium seemed to best capture the fading quality of the aging brick walls and signs of the inner city. “Those walls are nothing but layer upon layer of paint,” Lindenmeyer said. “And although they are noir themes, dark themes, the watercolors give a lightness to it and show the humor of the scene.”

With the “Inner City Series” at the McGroarty in his first local show, Lindenmeyer is focused on a series of sculptures utilizing a combination of found objects and neon light. One of those, titled “Jabberjaw Box,” is on display with his paintings.

By the spring, however, the artist said he’d be making his annual return to Portland for a long visit. “It helps to get away,” he said, “to get some fresh air and see some green spaces.”

“Inner City Series,” paintings by Michael Lindenmeyer, continues through March 7 at the McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga. Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays, or by appointment. Free. Call (818) 352-5285.