SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Small Obsessions : Tiny sculptures, engravings and paintings are on display in ‘The Art of Miniatures’ at Carnegie Art Museum.

Centerstage at the Carnegie Art Museum is an exhibition all about the art of thinking small. “The Art of Miniatures: A Retrospective,” true to its name, is a celebration of scaling down, featuring three skilled artists from the county.

The peewee figurines and sculptures of Robert Olszewski, the postage stamp-size etchings and engravings of John Anthony Miller and the small landscape paintings of Frederik Grue add up to a varied and interesting show that requires a lot of squinting to appreciate.

But, deftly rendered as the art is, the show invites questions of craftiness and intent, veering within inches--millimeters, even--of kitschy novelty. The very fact of the work’s smallness amounts to a kind of obsessive concern for these artists and the way they create, more than the content therein.

Much of the museum is given over to a sort of portrait of an artist’s process, retrospectively tracing the path by which Robert Olszewski came to make his hot-selling “micro sculptures.”

Olszewski was a painter who moved to the area from Pennsylvania in 1970 and taught art in Oxnard schools for several years while trying to find himself a medium. For the past 15 years, he has been producing thimble-size sculptures and has garnered considerable acclaim and marketability in the specialized world of miniatures.

What we find in the retrospective show, though, is a restless painter who shuffled through various styles and showed no particular early tendencies toward the miniaturist imperative.

He shifted between realism and impressionism as a young artist, doing misty plein-air paintings such as “Downtown Lunch” and “Fourth of July.” Olszewski worked in a loose, distorted style of figuration reminiscent of such Bay Area painters as Richard Deibenkorn and Wayne Theibaud.

One especially impressive series of paintings from 1970 shows the artist tightening the focus on his subjects and experimenting with Edward Hopper-esque notions of space and composition. In “Portrait of My Father,” the shirtless man is a somewhat desolate, somewhat heroic figure against a bold, red brick house and an empty field.

Hopper’s influence is again up front in Olszewski’s 1973 paintings of bikini-clad gals in a convertible, seen in stark contrast to the brute metallic mass of a train, with the subjects arranged obliquely in the composition.

The scaling-down epiphany for the artist came after a painting was stolen. The police asked for a photograph of the lost painting and, having none, Olszewski painted a smaller version. A miniaturist was born.

“The artistic value of a work of art is not determined by its size,” he writes on one of the many statements scattered around the exhibition.

After dabbling in openly sentimental papier-mache pieces, Olszewski began his current series of micro sculptures, highly detailed bronze polychrome replicas of figurines, Oriental artifacts, religious icons, cowboy sculptures, children’s lore and other sources.

Were these pieces any larger, they would fall into the category of precious knickknacks. But in their miniaturized states, they take on a surreal aspect. His is a process of appropriation, basing his work on objects you might find on your grandmother’s windowsill.

Olszewski shows scenes from the Nativity, a version of a Russian porcelain figurine from 1880, and “Bronco Buster,” after Frederick Remington. Fittingly, his storybook scenes include such scale-bending fantasies as “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Alice in Wonderland.”

Through this trick of scale, he forces the viewer to think small, to reconsider the source from an entirely new perspective. These are precious objects that would be whisked away if you sneezed, which makes them even more precious.

Miniaturists tend to hark back to antiquity for content, and Miller dwells on Anglophiliac imagery, without making any discernible comment on what we’re seeing. “The Life and Times of Queen Victoria” is a framed series of Victorian scenes. English castles, manors and manners constitute the artistic landscape.

We search for some intellectual undercurrent but find mainly a remarkable facility for getting details right.

Grue is a different sort of animal, whose smallish but not “micro” landscape paintings are richly hued and shamelessly steeped in 19th Century, pre-modern aesthetics. Verdant landscapes and voluptuous fruits are given distinction by their unseemly size.

“June, Marion County” leaps out of the lot. Deep green vegetation and an idyllic hillside envelope the “figures” in the composition. Three cows loll, lazily, as cows do, in the picture plane’s middle ground.

Love of things miniature and massive are peculiar human tics. For this reviewer’s eccentric tastes, those cows are worth the price of admission.

‘Desert by Sea’

Kakine, a.k.a. Catherine Hannon, runs the Art City II gallery by day, but is also a photographer who brings her camera along to exotic locales. Her current show of work in the window of Jaffe’s Camera features images taken in Baja and at a New Mexico stone quarry.

Forms emerge, abstractly, as light rakes across barren hills. Tempestuous clouds loom over a canyon, and a lone tree stands silhouetted against a mottled sky. A murky sort of poetry results.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “The Art of Miniatures: A Retrospective,” through March 28 at Carnegie Art Museum, 424 South C St., Oxnard. Call 385-8158.

* “Desert by Sea,” photography by Kakine, through Feb. 23 at Jaffe’s Camera, 2640 Main St., Ventura. Call 643-2231.