The Color of Creativity : Suzanne Bothwell’s vibrant paintings convey humanity’s search for connections.

It is the vibrant color of Suzanne Bothwell’s paintings that leaps out and grabs a viewer first. Then one can’t help but be a little overwhelmed by the sheer robustness of the paintings’ larger-than-life figures and their spirited interactions in highly charged settings.

But Bothwell has used her virtuoso painting abilities not to astonish, but to convey her own, and by extension humanity’s, volatile search for meaningful connections. In her solo show at the Orlando Gallery, several of the paintings draw upon rituals of domestic life.

A woman is on the telephone in “No Dice.” A man stands behind her in a threatening pose. In “Remote Control,” a man holds a remote control device. Here, he tries to link up not with a television set, but with the figure of a beautiful African woman. In “Epicenter,” painted soon after the Northridge earthquake, a man and a woman attempt to regain their balance in a domain that is cockeyed.

“I am interested in the psychological undercurrents of male-female relationships,” Bothwell said. “In the paintings, people are unconnected. There is a degree of isolation. We are trying to connect to something, be it animals or nature or people.”

The sheer size of these paintings encourages viewers to make contact with them. “I like being surrounded by large scale, by a painting you can enter,” Bothwell said. “I want you to feel one-to-one with the painting.”

Bothwell’s paintings are “always from the female point of view,” she said. But in earlier work, the female figures were more passive than those of the present series. In the more recent compositions, the women look outward, in effect, “being aggressive to the viewer.

“They are all different aspects of me,” said the artist.

Gallery director Bob Gino described Bothwell’s approach to painting as “totally unique (to) her. Her stylization is really so personal.

“I love the fantasy element, too, that’s so wonderful in her work. But her colors--come on, what can you say?” he added. “Her use of red is penetrating and exhilarating.”

“I love color. It’s very sensuous to me and I can never get enough of it,” said Bothwell, a Los Angeles native who lived in Hollywood for about 15 years before she moved to Taft, an oil town not far from Bakersfield, in 1990.

Her fascination with the color red evolved out of her view of wild poinsettias growing over her wall in Hollywood--”a big explosion of cadmium red,” she said--and a visit to the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. There, one whole room containing female figures had been painted in red. A trip to India two years ago only enhanced her fascination with the color.

Though she painted the smaller works in the show primarily in earth tones, they remain “rich of color even without a full palette,” she said.

Bothwell uses color to reveal, in an abstract sense, the interior of the human figure. “That comes from studying anatomy, from thinking about all those things going on under the skin,” she said.

An early influence on her approach to painting was the late UCLA art professor Jan Stussy. In “Point of Tangency,” an homage to him, Bothwell portrays Stussy after brain surgery in relation to a likeness of herself and a model carrying a mannequin. “He always talked about the point of tangency,” she said, describing a state in which people manage to reach each other.

Several of her paintings contain either images of children or a visual reference to an absent child. In the charcoal and spray-paint image of “Karla,” the woman presents her arms as if she were holding a baby, but her arms are empty. “Forgive My Chains” shows a woman reaching for something she doesn’t have. These visual metaphors are poignantly significant to Bothwell.

“A big issue I’m dealing with is not being able to have children,” she said. “And yet, I’m giving birth to a painting.”

Through that process of making art, Bothwell said she intends to maintain a connection to “seeing life as a child would, keeping it exciting and being unjudgmental and uninhibited like a child. When you make art, even if you don’t make money, you’ve had a very rich life.”

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WHERE AND WHEN:

What: “Suzanne Bothwell, Paintings.”

Location: Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. Ends March 3.

Call: (818) 789-6012.