Neon Drawings Display Artist’s Lighter Side : Frank Romero depicts simple subjects such as a fish and a Chevy in Santa Monica show

For the past two or three years, Los Angeles artist Frank Romero has worked with neon occasionally to punctuate his artwork. Recently, he got the idea of doing something more ambitious. Rather than use neon as merely an illuminating device, he decided to do a whole show of neon drawings.

The colorful and fun-spirited results of his collaboration with neon artist Michael Flechtner are on view in the exhibit “Frank Romero: Neon Drawings” in the Sam Francis Gallery at Crossroads School in Santa Monica.

“This is colored light, and you can make it take lines, take the shapes you want,” Romero said at the gallery while looking over the show with Flechtner. “I like to do little sketches. They’re childish drawings in a sense, but I always thought interpreting them in this medium would be very pure. These are the things I do all the time, my own personal iconography,” Romero said.

Among about a dozen drawings, each mounted on a painted box, is a Romero “Palm Tree” and an exotic, tropical “Fish” inspired by a trip to Cabo San Jose.

“Cat and Mouse” depicts Romero’s studio cat, Scamp, with a mouse between his teeth. “Scamp poses for us, and he likes to get his paws in paint. Then he walks around and does little paintings all over the studio,” Romero said. “This drawing is based on a true incident of him with a mouse.”

“Packard Burger and Curly Q Fries” came out of real life as well. “One day we were at the Packard Grill, and Frank ordered a Packard Burger,” Flechtner said. “Halfway through the burger, he got out his sketch pad and did this drawing of his lunch. He said he wanted it to be in the show.

“He gave me the drawings, and I redrew them in the way that I can bend the glass tubes. Then I transferred those drawings to fiberglass material. That’s what I did all the bending on. He gave me some leeway as to what I could do with color.”

Flechtner rendered Romero’s World War II vintage “Flying Wing” airplane--which will appear to the very young as a Stealth bomber--in various shades of blue. A fanciful “Pistola,” described by Romero as “my Roy Rogers kind of cowboy gun,” has been equipped with circuitry so that three little bullets light up in sequence, making the gun appear to be shooting.

No Romero show would be complete without his vision of the automobile. In this exhibit, there are two large cars. One--”a Chevy in a sense, so it has a little bit to do with Chicano culture,” he said--has neon touches that outline the painted car body and form the wheels.

The other, “ ’38 Chevy,” is the piece de resistance of the show. Romero had the car’s shape cut out and removed from a large, rectangular piece of wood, leaving just the car’s outline. The area surrounding the outline has been painted maroon.

A piece of unpainted wood fills in the body of the car. But Romero, instead of painting in the car body’s details--wheels, fenders, doors--had Flechtner delineate them with bright red, orange, green, blue, yellow and pink neon glass tubes. The car comes complete with a neon driver and a dog with big teeth sitting in the back seat.

Romero said that even when these pieces aren’t illuminated, “they’re works of art. It’s just so wonderful to see them. I like working with Michael. It’s a real nice dialogue we have going.”

“Frank Romero: Neon Drawings” at Sam Francis Gallery, Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, 1714 21st St., Santa Monica, through Feb. 28. Open 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Call (310) 829-7391, Ext. 325.

MEXICAN ART: “Companeras de Mexico: Women Photograph Women,” an exhibit of 68 black-and-white photographs by six leading Mexican photographers, presents not only the differing tones and styles of the photographers, but also a variety of aspects of contemporary Mexican life.

Organized by the University Art Gallery at UC Riverside, the show of photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, Laura Cohen, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Eugenia Vargas and Mariana Yampolsky is on view at the Social and Public Art Resource Center.

Iturbide’s photographs document women of the Oaxacan town of Juchitan between 1979 and 1986. Gallery coordinator Marietta Bernstorff said Juchitan has a matriarchal society where women run the town and are its merchants.

Vargas’ arresting “Body Art: Self Portrait” series is a journey into the self. In each portrait, her face or naked body is covered with dried mud and set against textured walls or barren landscape. “The history of photography in Mexico has been documentary photography. It is rare to see work like Vargas’ from there,” Bernstorff said.

Yampolsky’s prints capture moments in the lives of indigenous people--young girls in a classroom, an old man and woman in their rocking chairs, a woman holding and caressing her young child.

Grobet focuses on women wrestlers in Mexico, capturing the high drama and action of a match as well as quiet moments offstage, without any sense of condescension. These women appear strong and proud.

Alvarez Bravo’s 1940 series of photographs of Frida Kahlo portrays a pensive Kahlo studying herself. In 1953, Alvarez Bravo, as director of the Galeria de Arte Contemporaneo, organized the only one-person show that Kahlo had in Mexico during her lifetime.

“Companeras de Mexico: Women Photograph Women” at SPARC, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice, through Feb. 29. Open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays. Call (310) 822-9560.

BLACK HISTORY: The Heritage Gallery, which has been in business on La Cienega Boulevard since 1961, is celebrating Black History Month with an exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by several black artists, including Charles White, Romare Bearden and Ernie Barnes.

Among the 30 works by almost a dozen artists are two drawings by Barnes, “The Trumpet Player” and “The Saxophone Player.” Bearden (1912-1988) is represented by two 1980 lithographs and a 1946 watercolor, “Jazz Movement.”

Many of the paintings by White (1918-1979) are of women. Frank Williams’ recent bold-colored oil-on-paper portraits are especially expressive. The show also presents engaging work by Calvin Burnett, H. Bennett, Richard Wolford, William Pajaud, James Porter and Margaret Burroughs.

“Celebration of Black History Month” at Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, through Feb. 29. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Call (213) 652-7738.