Venice Artist Strives to Capture the Nuances of Los Angeles’ Non-Stereotypical Vistas

Unlike the environs of Paris, Los Angeles’ automobile-oriented landscape does not lend itself to an artist who enjoys setting up an easel on a quaint street and painting the richness of the local scene.

Yet painter Stephanie Sanchez has not been deterred from going out to capture nuances in L. A. vistas that have nothing to do with the stereotypical images of car and freeways, bright sunshine and attractive movie stars. She believes that the city’s humanism is missing from many pictures of Los Angeles.

“I paint outside, and everything I do is from life. I’m not interested in the quick or immediate experience. I’m trying to communicate to people who live here something much stronger and longer-lasting,” she said. “The real, scrappy, everyday Los Angeles is what fascinates me. It’s probably the part that is most maligned and overlooked, but I see the homely side with affection.”

Sanchez’s recent views of Los Angeles, now on exhibit at Tatistcheff Gallery, reflect her ability to see vitality and grace in ordinary scenes that most of us just ignore as we pass by. Mainly using muted colors, she reveals a Los Angeles horizon as it often is: toned down to gray and brown hues from the presence of fog and smog. Rather than detracting from the landscapes, her painterly interpretations of the sky provide them with a warm atmospheric quality.

“Supermarket in Koreatown” depicts the market’s loading dock. Sanchez sat for several months in front of a supermarket loading dock across the street from friend and painter Keisho Okayama’s home before she painted it.

“It embodied everything about Los Angeles in one view that I could imagine,” she said. This backside L. A. vista includes a nearby church and a Wilshire Boulevard high-rise.

“Clark Street” characterizes the view across the street from her home in Venice. “I will see the most common stucco houses, and then a tree that’s out of a Carpaccio painting. It’s wonderful because it’s timeless, so simple and direct,” she said.

“There are some bucolic, very natural elements to this area. Occasionally, the withering architecture is offset by romantic elements. The challenge is to paint your environment and impart the kind of meaning it has to you as an individual.”

Sanchez said she is often not conscious about why she decides that a view is compelling until after she’s completed the painting. In “Billboard on Lincoln Blvd.,” she appreciated the dynamic of the billboard’s flatness juxtaposed with real space. But later she realized that she was also drawn to the picture of the woman on the billboard, who might be laughing or crying. “I identified with the emotion projected there,” she said.

In several paintings of a modest Hollywood neighborhood, Sanchez tackled the ubiquitous L. A. palm tree. “I had resisted doing palm trees because they are so conventional, but they are very real. If you put them in space and deal with them realistically, it’s very challenging,” she said.

Several still lifes--what Sanchez calls interior landscapes--are also included in the show. “I started looking at my studio like I look at Los Angeles,” she said. “It afforded me the opportunity to study spatial and formal relationships between things.”

The objects in her studio--a skull, perfume bottle, bulbs, watch, cigar box, dice and shells--have been there a long time and appear in various still-life combinations along with flowers and renditions of her own paintings.

One of her most pleasant experiences as a plein-air painter, however, was when she painted a billboard and day-care center on La Brea Avenue. “I had all the kids drawing,” she said.

“They were touched that I was there. Part of being outside is getting people who live in these areas to challenge themselves about art. It’s important to communicate with people. It makes me feel the best I could ever feel as a painter.”

“Stephanie Sanchez: Paintings” at Tatistcheff Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, through April 26. Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Call (310) 395-8807.

OF PAINT AND CRAYONS: Galerie Malraux on Larchmont Boulevard specializes in showing Caribbean art. Its current exhibit, “Jamaican Expressionism,” highlights the painting and drawing of Milton George.

In his artist’s statement, the artist, who signs his work “Milton,” says: “My paintings are from inside: They are not about what I see, but what I feel. I really don’t pre-plan. The paint or crayon dictates how it wants to go.”

His paint and crayons go in colorful, abstract and figurative ways to comment on the social, political, environmental and economic issues of the day. Among the 18 works is a series of oil pastels that focus on the seamy side-streets and the temptations of a seedy life, such as his “Room of Joy.”

In “Be Fifty Too,” Milton’s response to the Persian Gulf War, people wear hats that first appear like sombreros. But upon closer inspection, it is clear that they are B-52 bombers.

“The Heap,” a pile of cans, bottles, garbage and junk, alerts viewers to what we are doing to the planet. “Man in the City” is a self-portrait. Milton stands surrounded by encroaching high-rises, fancy cars and his vision of a couple of New Yorkers.

“You can see the fear in his eyes,” said Rachael Fromme of Galerie Malraux, who explained that the artist painted this portrait shortly after a trip to New York. “He cut his trip short because he was so upset by the quality of life there. He believes the Earth should be sacred.”

Also in the gallery are paintings by Robert (African) Cookhorne, Douglas Wallace and Stanford Watson, and bronze and clay sculpture by Gene Pearson.

“Jamaican Expressionism” at Galerie Malraux, 137 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, through Thursday. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Call (213) 469-7414.

HITTING THE BEACH: For the past 45 years, German-born psychoanalyst and artist Erwin Angres has found his art materials along the shores of Chicago’s Lake Michigan and those of La Jolla. Every day he combs the beaches in search of stones, seashells and driftwood that seem to him to be more than just inanimate objects.

Sometimes he will study his inspired bounty for weeks before he determines how to bring out the true and hidden spirit of each object.

Angres does not carve his objects, but develops images out of them by painting and/or combining them to emphasize the lines of the features he sees. Figures may emerge from rocks in relief form, or stones may serve as the body to a figure whose head is shell, crystal or dried fruit.

“The crevices in the stone begin to move and talk once you train your eyes and ears on them,” he said.

The eclectic, amusing and touching men, women, animals and religious figures created from Angres’ quests are on display at the Gordon Gallery in the show, “The Spirit of the Rock, and Other Natural Things.”

Among the 68 sculptures is “Moses.” His head is painted rock, his body a substantial piece of driftwood. Driftwood also serves as the body for a more willowy conceptual nude whose face is made from dried apples. Angres makes faces out of grapefruits and bananas as well.

Dried cactus forms the long body of “The Patrician.” His face is rock, his hair seaweed, his collar a sand dollar.

He envisioned a Talmud scholar carrying a book in one rock, and the head of a mermaid in barnacles on muscle shell. Confucius appeared before him in a stone. An Arab nomad woman arose from crystal and shell on rock.

“In Hebrew and Greek mythology, living beings are often turned into stones. I try to do the opposite, make stones become alive,” he said.