SIGHTS : Musician Trades Horn for Paintings at Exhibit : What William Roper lacks in artistic technique, he makes up for in raw energy. His works are on display at the Carnegie Museum.

Tradition, in the musical and visual arts, holds nothing on William Roper. The Los Angeleno has made something of a name for himself in jazz and fringe music circles for his work on that lowly, rarely played instrument, the tuba. He is also known for improvisational moxie, a hell-bent and often zany approach to chasing his own private muse.

What we find upstairs at the Carnegie Art Museum is a different aspect of Roper’s expressive machinery, that of a painter, a producer of often fascinating and unhinged imagery. It’s not for nothing that he calls his exhibition “Gumbo,” a spicy, multi-ingredient stew.

Freely blending references to religion, black history and dream-fueled irrationality, Roper works in a funky, flamboyant style. It appears to be made up of equal parts faux folk art, hip-level surrealism and personalized cartoonishness. Humor and color are overflowing, often disguising serious themes.

As a kind of autobiographical in-joke, the first work in the show--when viewed from left to right--is “Art Class.” Here, a startled, wide-eyed young man (a young Roper?) peeps in on a nude model through the window of an art studio. On the wall is a sign for the “Tuba City Truck Stop.”

Religious imagery, woven throughout this set of paintings, is approached from a skewed angle. Loudly colored triptych panels depict “The Wedding at Cana” and “Genesis, Chap. II,” with figures distorted and mythologized.

Departing from biblical narrative entirely, “The Last Supper” is actually a seamy, eye-popping tale of misdirected lust, between a deaconess, her teen-age daughter and a lascivious pastor. In “Don’t Want No Apple (the Annunciation),” an innocent girl sits amid a swirling melange of ruinous temptation--snakes in the grass and the like.

Fantastic and vaguely morbid visions come through in such works as “Moonlight Serenade,” a Day of the Dead scenario. In “Circus of the Moon,” a pervasive fear and dread interrupts the potential festivity of the occasion. The same could be said of Roper’s general aesthetic on display here.

Humor gives way to rueful indignation in “Life in These United States,” a pointedly ironic title. This allegorical scene pays homage to slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, whose head floats down a river. A blonde woman waters a plant sprouting the head of a clown, next to mutant, mythic beasts in an ominously lit dusk.

Roper also shows pieces that delve into niches of black history (this show runs through the end of February, Black History Month). “Gimme a Pig Foot” is--by Roper’s standards--a relatively straight-faced portrait of Bessie Smith, who died from injuries in an auto accident when she was refused medical care because of her race. “My, My Ain’t the World Strange” deals with the fickle finger of fame, as relates to Muhammad Ali.

One of the impressive large paintings here, “Toby’s Fishfry (40 Acres and a Mule)” is an angular scene in which slaves on the verge of emancipation in the post-Antebellum South fail to heed the warning of an archangel. In the historical moment seen here, hope is running high, but reality is set to pounce.

It is possible to find some connective tissue between Roper the musician and Roper the visual conjurer, both involving raw, uncensored energy. This is not to suggest, however, that Roper has the kind of technical mastery in the visual realm that he does behind his horn.

These paintings reveal a simple, exaggerated attitude regarding image-making. Often, Roper deploys a self-consciously clumsy sense of composition and a rickety way with figuration, and he can be literary almost to a fault.

Still, the unabashed and rough-hewn paintings here seize the senses and excite visceral interest. If impolite and a mess, academically, they are all aquiver with ideas and narratives, both personal and historical.

Roper will appear at the museum with tuba in tow when his chamber group Judicanti Responsura performs at the official reception at 7 p.m. Feb. 3.

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Currently downstairs at the museum is “Kente: A Symbol of Asante Wealth and Status,” a show of as much anthropological as artistic interest. Stretches of Kente cloth, stemming from the 19th-Century-based Ashanti culture of Ghana, are elaborately woven and iridescently colored.

Examples of the Kente cloth, elegantly geometric in design and predating concepts in 20th-Century art, are the centerpiece of the exhibition. Supplementing the actual artifacts are paintings by Deborah McDuff and photographs from Ghana, detailing this admirable, pre-industrial tradition.

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Meanwhile, the Carnegie’s back gallery devoted to Ventura County artists is showing “From the Edge: Postcards by Kim Loucks.” It’s as strong a show as Loucks, a longtime Ventura scene-maker, has yet had in the area.

The collage medium suits her well. Loucks is an avowed hunter and gatherer known to make art from trash and other found materials.

In this case, the found objects are postcards, extravagantly and wryly defaced. Within this controlled, self-limited scale and format, tourist scenes have been remade into souvenirs of another world, where diverse species of animals chase each other, and body parts and ancient icons float mysteriously above landscapes.

Loucks has put minute brushwork on the original postcards, giving a painterly texture to the once-flat images. She’s not above a visual pun, as in “Dr. Marten Goes to the Beach,” with its chic monster-sized shoe on the bluffs.

A vaguely political spin is encountered with “Horse Rushing to Meet an Elephant,” with the two symbols on a crash course on a pier. Eco-politics flare up in “An Unlikely Visitation,” with a Madonna head descending on a beach with an anti-nuclear banner.

An effectively blithe spirit hovers in the show, stopping short of the kind of wanton giddiness that can sometimes result from such cutting and pasting.

Details

* FYI: “Kente: A Symbol of Asante Wealth and Status,” “Gumbo: Paintings by William Roper,” through Feb. 26, and “From the Edge: Postcards by Kim Loucks,” through Jan. 15, at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St., Oxnard, 385-8157.