SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Art and Politics : An exhibit of Winston Churchill’s paintings chronicles the life of the statesman, who took up the hobby at age 40.

Art and politics, those strange bedfellows, are merging all over the place at the Reagan library. But the pact is benign. The art is pleasant enough, and the artist was a towering figure of 20th-Century history. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Welcome to “Painting as a Pastime: The Art and Treasures of Sir Winston Churchill,” an exhibition whose title is a tip-off to its modest aesthetic standards.

One can smell the irony. Reagan himself blurred the boundary between art (well, show biz) and politics--he was a Sunday actor instead of a Sunday painter.

A stroll through the official Reagan section of the museum is a stroll through the Reagan saga, from his Dixon, Ill., home through Hollywood to Sacramento and on to Washington.

In its own more sketchy way, the Churchill exhibit, too, is a selective travelogue through the life of the British prime minister. It’s no surprise that a scan of the dates on the paintings reveals nothing from the war years of the ‘40s.

The only indicator of that stormy period is a deep green, jumbo-size jumpsuit in a plexiglass display case, the “siren suit” he often wore during the years in his command post. Painting then was the furthest thing from his mind.

Looking at the Churchill exhibition charitably--the only way, really--it can be viewed as a celebration of amateurism.

He didn’t pick up a brush until he was 40, and then began tentatively, dabbling with his daughter’s paints. Once he caught the fever, though, Churchill became a prolific painter who relished simple themes rendered simply.

Two unknown artists’ portraits of Churchill at an easel paint a striking picture of the statesman in the artistic throes. There stands the bulky frame of the great world leader, stabbing at the canvas with a long brush, squinting with concentration, and with his ever-present cigar protruding.

He was as realistic about his painterly pursuits as he was avid.

“We must not be ambitious,” Churchill wrote about the practice of those picking up a brush late in life, as an avocation. “We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.”

Above all, Churchill was a man of well-chosen words. Smatterings of his writings, on placards in the gallery and in a brochure, provide the exhibit with an enlightening subtext.

He wrote: “Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen.”

If his writing was laden with erudition and wit, his painting was unfailingly modest and straightforward. His was the sort of chunky mode of painting, falling in the cracks between Impressionism and realism, that epitomizes the work of the Sunday painter. He was a 20th-Century painter with a 19th-Century mind frame.

The bounty of landscapes, seascapes, still lifes and interior scenes scarcely reveal the life of someone in the clutches of history.

Painting afforded him not a way of examining the world at large, but a “balancing interval in life” through which he pursued idle pleasures and joie de vivre .

His 1915 painting, “Garden at the Farm,” shows a flourish of innocent greenery in contrast to his painting of “Plug Street, Lawrence Farm” of a year later. The war had begun and this once-peaceful enclave was now a strategic outpost.

Art for art’s sake is at play in “Bottlescape” (1930), an interesting study of bottles on a table, which is an exercise in diffused, deceptive lighting.

“Amsterdam Harbor From Lord Beaverbrook’s Yacht” (1938) is a sea scene whose title suggests the lofty position of the beholder. Churchill, the painter, could afford to view the world from a yacht or spend a few hours gazing at an assortment of bottles.

A more mysterious and affecting painting is “Circus” from the ‘30s. A sense of drama and deadpan humor emerge in the somber depiction of an elephant act (fitting, perhaps, in this GOP outpost).

From the evidence here, Churchill knew more about cigars than painting, but the exhibit nonetheless carries a strong appeal that transcends matters of artistic merit. It’s a glimpse into the off-hour expressions of a legend.

Maybe 50 years hence, affectionate archivists will pore over the collected saxophone recordings of Bill Clinton.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Painting as a Pastime: The Art of Winston Churchill” through Feb. 21 at the Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley. 522-8444.