‘Earth’ Exhibit a Natural : Sylmar gallery’s idyllic setting provides backdrop for a show about our planet.

Five years ago, painter Mark Venaglia embarked on his own escape from New York. And for him the world has never been the same.

Where he had once painted urban scenes, Venaglia found himself drawn to the bright colors of sunflowers and fresh produce and blue skies. “When I came out here, that was my first time out of the New York area my whole life,” says Venaglia, 33. “I remember looking at the sky, and for the first time I realized it was round. My only experience of the sunset or the sky before that was between buildings. I planted my first gardens. I really discovered the Earth.”

How fitting now for Venaglia’s canvases of the natural world to be part of “Earth Time,” a group exhibition of paintings, sculptures and mixed media at the Century Gallery in Sylmar.

Venaglia’s five paintings share space at the county-owned gallery with Karen Jollie’s watercolors, Robert Bassler’s large-scale paintings and sculptures and Jonathan Martin’s collages, which mix autobiographical elements with rust and paint. Gallery director Lee Musgrave sees in the group show “a move toward humanism, toward a connection between the Earth and human beings.”

Venaglia says the overall theme of the show was particularly appropriate given the gallery’s quiet, idyllic setting in Sylmar’s Veterans Memorial Park.

“The thing I like the most is that the gallery itself is nestled at the base of those beautiful mountains,” says Venaglia, who lives in Hollywood. “I couldn’t imagine a better setting for a show of work about the Earth.

“It seemed like every artist was obsessed with a different aspect of the Earth,” he says of those exhibiting in the show. “The level of intensity seemed to be very high for all the work.”

Bassler’s three large paintings portray the Earth from high above the atmosphere, where violent, swirling clouds gather menacingly over dark oceans. That storm imagery reappears in Bassler’s three pyramid-shaped sculptures.

The paintings of tree surfaces by Jollie represent the subtle changes in color, the shades of blue and green and brown she says she discovers in nature.

“They’re alive, changing, and never the same from day to day,” says Jollie, who lives in Sun Valley. Her watercolors “come from things people walk by without even noticing.”

In another part of the gallery hang the collage works of Martin, who has mixed personal memorabilia from four years studying art in Italy during the late 1970s with geometric shapes made from rust. In one piece, Martin’s student ID card from Florence’s Instituto Statale d’Arte shares the canvas with other yellowing remnants of his youth, all surrounded by the rust.

To create the rust elements, Martin wets pieces of iron and allows them to sit for several days on a surface of either paper or canvas, a process that leaves dark orange shadows. “I like the metaphor of rust, the decay and separation,” says Martin, 38. “I feel like there is a sense of longing, and a little bit of pain.”

In contrast, Venaglia’s large painting of a sunflower is all bright yellows and greens, set against a deep blue sky. But the seemingly peaceful image is crowded with violent, crazed movement within the flower. A calmer moment comes in his “Establish the Proper Vibrations,” a tightly cropped painting of red, green and yellow peppers.

It’s the sort of subject matter that is likely to keep Venaglia in California. “I have never been happier anywhere than I am here,” he says. “I’m sorry it took me so many years to get out here.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Earth Time,” a group exhibition with works by Robert Bassler, Karen Jollie, Jonathan Martin and Mark Venaglia.

Location: Century Gallery, 13000 Sayre St., Sylmar.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. Ends March 10.

Price: Free.

Call: (818) 362-3220.