Hers Is Unfinished Business : Artist Starts With History and Pop Culture But Never Quite. . .

“I am an unfinisher,” Los Angeles artist Kim Dingle remarked Monday, apropos of one of her paintings that shows a sketchy-looking figure of Minnie Mouse confronting a skinny, tense-looking little girl in a skimpy petticoat.

“I never made my bed since I moved out of my mother’s house, and I never finish a painting. I learned to embrace The Unfinished.”

In what she admitted was her first public speech about her work, Dingle’s oddball sense of humor and deadpan delivery drew frequent shrieks of laughter from her audience at an “Art Forum” lecture at Rancho Santiago College.

Who else would think of making a work showcasing the wildly askew maps of the United States she asked fellow students at Claremont Graduate School to draw from memory? (One classmate who left out all the peninsulas, Dingle said, was “a woman who was extremely angry at men.”)

Who else would paint a “Portrait of Ed Sullivan as a Young Girl”? (Dingle had seen a museum show of “some obscure American Impressionist,” a landscape artist who painted only one figure, of a young girl: “I thought it was so bad. She looked like Ed Sullivan to me.”)

Who else has a mother called Cram who stuffs the family photo album with snapshots of livestock (“We grew up in San Gabriel in a cul-de-sac; cows were profoundly important to us”) and who treasures a photograph of Jesus taken by a neighbor in 1939?

In Dingle’s painting, “Cram as George Washington,” a subtly feminized father of his country is shown in a pensive pose. “I just started painting Cram’s hairdo on every portrait of George Washington I came across for several months,” Dingle said. “I never got to the dollar bill.” She said her mother likes being mentioned in art reviews: “She doesn’t have any idea what I’m doing, but she’s always approved of me.”

Dingle’s main subjects are U.S. history and popular culture, perceived from a wry, myth-debunking point of view.

A painting of skinny, pale legs on a black background--”Abe Lincoln’s Legs”--was inspired by George Bush, Dingle said. “I think Abe Lincoln’s legs would be luminous white. He never wore shorts. I’m a fan of Abe Lincoln, and I wanted to do something to show the profound humanity I think this man had as our President, in contrast to an interview with George Bush on the golf course after 2,000 or 3,000 people were killed in Panama (when the U.S invaded in December 1989 to depose dictator Manuel Noriega).”

Dingle, who received her master of fine arts degree two years ago from Claremont, has had several solo exhibits at Los Angeles galleries and will show new work at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles beginning Oct. 24. She also is represented in “I Thought California Would Be Different: New Work in the Permanent Collection,” at the South Coast Plaza satellite of the Laguna Art Museum through Oct. 4.

A devoted reader of the Recycler’s want ads, Dingle said she decided to paint her own versions of paintings described in bizarre terms by would-be sellers. In her hands, a canvas listed as an “Eskimo Sea Goddess, from Cape Dorset” became a cocoa-skinned figure in a jaunty red suit and black high-tops, perched on a spectral white rock. “Lady lying down on sofa, a little exposed” turned into a portrait of Dingle’s mother, reclining on a couch in an outfit that reveals a slice of white belly.

One of Dingle’s works consists of framed photographs of her 300-piece eraser collection, juxtaposed with racist-sounding text excerpted from “The Romance and Drama of the Rubber Industry,” by U.S. tire magnate Harvey Firestone.

Someone in the audience asked whether Dingle meant to direct attention to the exploitation of the Malaysian laborers mentioned in the text.

“That’s up to you,” Dingle replied. “A lot of people made a lot of sense out of it.”

For all her beguiling humor and eccentricity, Dingle deals with darker aspects of American life. She has painted objects of aggression (guns, knives, boxing gloves) in the hands of babies posing sweetly in old photographs. She has painted black-and-blue marks on the faces of round-eyed tots in snapshots. (“They’re not about violence at all,” Dingle says of this work. “They’re about vulnerability.”)

A recurrent image in her paintings is “Everygirl,” a serious-looking little girl in a full-skirted, ‘50s-style frock the artist calls an Easter dress. At first she shows up in such absurdist works as “Soldiers in Dress Uniform”--two little girls holding rifles. Then Dingle painted her obdurate little persona on top of various “found” objects displaying images of the mythical Wild West. She rides a mustang in a corny horse painting; she runs alongside a sheriff on a printed bedspread from the ‘50s; she confronts a relaxing cowboy pictured on a Coors beer poster.

“A lot of us (as little girls) have experienced similar Western fantasies as little boys . . . this (macho, close-to-nature) mythology and all the BS,” Dingle said.

Her other alterations include adding Chinese people to a swatch of Western-themed wallpaper (“There are many Chinese in our Western mythology and they’re never depicted”) and painting some of the cowboys’ faces black.

Dingle says her most recent body of work started out as “Easter girls boxing the hell out of each other.” In one of these untitled oil paintings on linen, two girls in Mary Janes and fluffy, aquamarine dresses punch each other with red boxing gloves. Another painting shows a black girl in a white frock dragging the limp body of a white girl whose snowy dress flies up to expose her white underpants.

“Most of the paintings that are very close to me and very private, I have never been able to title,” Dingle said. The newer works open up “more profound emotions for me,” she added. “I don’t have a cover, a net. They’re not as safe emotionally.”

The struggles occurring in the works are also visible on their surfaces, which reveal traces of Dingle’s earlier attempts at positioning the figures’ limbs. But she is unapologetic about letting her mistakes show.

She recalled a TV program she saw about Rembrandt, who (in common with other artists of his day) covered up the repainted portions of his works so smoothly that they are visible only in X-rays.

“I don’t need to do that,” she said. “I’m not Rembrandt, and it’s 1992.”