SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Outskirts of Reality : Santa Paula’s John Nichols Gallery makes a breezy departure from its customary exhibits of photography.

Christine Brennan and Ruth Farnham are Ojai-based artists whose paintings operate on the outskirts of reality. From those points of common interest and origin, they depart sharply.

One deals in abstract animalia and mythology. The other alludes to landscape while veering amiably toward abstraction.

Together, their work adds up to a deceptively breezy, summery kind of show at the John Nichols Gallery in Santa Paula. Aside from its aesthetic charms, the exhibition also signals a return to action for the Nichols Gallery, which normally specializes in photography and has been dormant in recent months.

Brennan, whose work can also be seen at the Human Arts Gallery in Ojai, concocts wonderfully dreamy visions involving creatures of unspecific species in spaces that only vaguely relate to the world as we know it. In her paintings and enigmatic small woodcuts, Chagall-esque qualities of bubbly surrealism surface.

Slashes are required in any description of her hybrid imagery: in one painting, a half-woman/half-bird sits next to a sleeping face/mask on a curved earth/mythical mountain. In another, a bear-like creature rolls on a hillside, laughing fatalistically at the folly of existence. That, anyway, is how one reporter might see it.

Among Brennan’s recent projects are the illustrations for the children’s book, “Moses Goodleaf Learns to Walk,” soon to be published by the Ojai-based Glastonbury Press. The basic tension between the familiar and the fantastical generates intrigue somewhere between childlike imagination and adult-like subconscious transference.

Real world references seep into Farnham’s mode of abstraction, but become only departure points. Often, architectural obelisks cast shadows in otherwise non-representational works.

“Reflections in a Swimmer’s Eye” celebrates iridescent patterns of water-filtered light, as if viewed from underwater. Egyptian lore is the basis of “Night of the Large Few Stars.” Farnham also shows pieces done with oil pastel on Mylar over painted paper, which results in an intriguing muted visual effect.

The two artists provide for a fine study in contrasts. Brennan generally leaves her surreal narrative scenes untitled, while Farnham supplies poetic handles (i.e. “From the Memories of the Bird that Chanted to Me”).

Both create works that invite open-ended interpretation; that are psychologically loaded, if only gently. Angst and irony are only lightly sprinkled on. Perfect for a summer in Santa Paula.

NEOCLASSICIST’S DELIGHT: Ardent neoclassicists will have an ardent field day at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard. Fittingly, Kurt Wenner’s shameless neoclassicism is housed in a building that is itself a local role model of Greco-Roman fetishism.

Wenner, who maintains home bases in Santa Barbara and Oxnard, is an itinerant artist specializing in the Madonnari tradition (street painting). Most of his work is done on the walls of private homes, and his client list includes Kenny Loggins, we learn from the background material.

Anyone who took in the recent street painting festival at the Santa Barbara Mission might well appreciate Wenner’s painterly handiwork in that ephemeral art form, illustrated in this exhibit with a few photos.

In this show, he demonstrates his draftsman skill directly with a series of sanguine drawings of classical subjects. The real core of this exhibition, though, can be found in Wenner’s extravagantly scaled paintings that consume a fair amount of the Carnegie’s wall space.

“Idomeneo,” based on the Mozart opera, depicts the writhing, intricately entangled cast of classical characters in varying states of undress and emotional duress.

An avid student of Italian art of the Baroque and Mannerist periods of the 16th Century, Wenner is a shameless historicist whose time may have come.

Still, trained as we are by the conceptual gymnastics of 20th-Century aesthetics, we instinctively hunt for something that would betray that Wenner contemplates life and art among us. We look for some touch of ironic commentary or postmodern pastiche.

At face value, anyway, Wenner is also a conspicuously talented artist whose painterly facility and grandiose gestures can’t fail but impress on some level.

SCAPES AND ESCAPES: Painter Richard Phelps is a Santa Paula resident who teaches at Ventura College and who wriggles along the border separating landscape and abstractionist schemes.

In his current show of acrylic paintings at the Buenaventura Gallery, there is a world of difference between the straightforward landscape of “Summertime” and the amorphous diagonal swipe pattern of “Kristopher’s View.” His seascapes are often reduced to wavy horizontal bands, as if his vision itself were seaswept.

Phelps seems to be aiming more at depiction of unseen forces rather than physical surfaces of nature. For at least one viewer, though, Phelps’ slick use of acrylic sometimes looks too synthetic and suggestive of facile paint-slinging. A more organic approach might better capture the elusive quality of nature on canvas.

HARSH BEAUTY: Hailing from Sweden and now living in Santa Barbara, painter Ann Skiold is a rewardingly vigorous abstract expressionist whose showing at the Ojai Arts Center. In a statement, she explains that her tendency toward dark colors stems from “a harsh beauty in a rather severe climate” of her native land.

Her triptych “Requiem” is especially effective, with its raw vibrancy--if not turbulence--of interactive gestures and hues.

At her best, Skiold’s energetic abstract works quiver with contrasting forms and rough swatches of color. With her work, you get a bold sense of both the act and the catharsis of painting.

CHANGE AT THE TOP: Laura Zucker, the director of the Ventura Arts Council since last August, has been plucked by the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission. Beginning in August, Zucker will take over the commission’s executive director post.

“I was honored and excited about it,” she said, “but I’m sorry to be leaving Ventura. I was not looking to leave at all.”

Zucker will continue to consult with the local council, and she hopes to establish a link between the Ventura Arts Council and Los Angeles County “where none has previously existed.”

Cindy Zimmerman, former program coordinator of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, will head up the Ventura Arts Council beginning next month.

“I feel very confident that she’s going to be able to build on all the things we’ve started in this past year,” Zucker said, citing the opening of the Mayfair Theater as an art house, the move to a new, larger space in the Livery Arts Center and an increase of corporate and foundation funding.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Christine Brennan and Ruth Farnham at the John Nichols Gallery, 910 E. Main St. through July. 525-7804.

* “From Piazza to Palazzo: the Art of Kurt Wenner,” at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard, through July 12. 385-8157.

* Richard Phelps at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 Santa Clara, through June 20. 654-1235.

* Anne Skiold, paintings at the Ojai Arts Center, 113 S. Montgomery St., through June. 646-0117.