ART : Storms of Creativity : Jeanine Breaker looks skyward in expressing taut emotion in her small pastel works.

It is weather that first moves Los Angeles artist Jeanine Breaker to create her finely drawn landscapes. Not the temperate Southern California kind, but the weather she saw as a girl, growing up on a Wisconsin farm: for example, the storms that devastated crops just before harvest time and decimated farmers’ incomes.

“I start with an environmental condition that takes my breath away,” she said. “The sky gives me gifts.”

Breaker’s more than 30 small but mighty pastel works on view in Pierce College’s Art Gallery, several of them diptychs, are not only about weather or the natural environment, though. They are also landscapes of the mind, operatic renderings of the turbulent emotions that roar through body and soul and leave their own kind of devastation if they catch a person unaware.

Within most of the images are tiny figures facing danger. One hangs from a wire; another is up a pole or about to fall into a giant crevice. Fire threatens people in more than one work. Yet Breaker’s dark but richly colorful pastels convey anything but gloom and doom.

The work “is about vulnerability and facing strife, and optimism,” Breaker said. “It’s about putting yourself in precarious positions so you can grow. The figures are in peril, off-balance, but they haven’t lost their footing. They haven’t fallen in the fire. It’s not a negative to be in those positions, but it’s hard.”

“These are works that expose our subconscious fears, rages, longings and ambitions, and still project a burst of optimism and courage that is so integral to what is positive in the human spirit,” said gallery director Joan Kahn. “They made me think about danger and risk and being courageous in one’s own life. There’s this real sense of life and vitality and great power in them.”

To ensure that viewers understand the intended meanings of each work, Breaker titles each one and includes the phonetic spelling of the title words and selected definitions of them, much as they appear in a dictionary.

Inspired by an image of a burning rain forest in Belize, “rainwalk” (titles are lower case), includes the definition, “a walk as part of a ritual to invoke precipitation.” With “cold shut,” in which two people can’t seem to get together, we are told that it means, “brought together at too low a temperature to properly unite.”

“The words add a dimension to the work; it is more visually enriched because of the titles,” she said. “People are more accessed to the work. I lend my own interpretation of the pieces through the words. It feels real complete when I put visual art and words together.”

Breaker’s landscape images have been inspired by real landscapes such as those of Bryce and Zion national parks and the Betatikin Cliff Dwelling in the Navajo National Monument in Arizona. Though she takes photographs of landscapes that appeal to her, she does not work from the pictures.

She looks at them to “capture the mood,” and then puts them away, she said. “If I allow the mood to happen, then the figures come to me. Then the titles present themselves to me. I have to feel the figures because I can’t see them when I draw them. The chalk is too big.”

“I like the fact that (the small works) look like 5-by-7 photographs. A friend said, ‘They are like film stills. You see into them, next to them, above them and below them.’ I’m also whispering in the little ones. Of course, they’re all self-portraits.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Jeanine Breaker, Pastels.”

Location: Pierce College Art Gallery, 6201 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Ends Sept. 22.

Call: (818) 719-6498.