SIGHTS : A Wistful Tale of Americana Is Told in Santa Paula Exhibit : The watercolor collection on display provides an overview of small-town life as it was half a century ago.

You don’t go into a show called “Watercolors from the Santa Paula Collection”--in the bosom of the Union Oil Museum--with expectations of the offbeat. What’s expected are gentle winds of sentimentality and nostalgia, mild natural vistas and slices of Americana--of which this exhibit delivers in ample portions.

And yet, situated in the midst of it this fluid warmth and artistic lightness of being is a quirky centerpiece. The artist is the late Jessie Arms Botke, the most widely known and collected of Santa Paulan artists. The painting: a still-life called, simply and truthfully, “Avocados.”

A sly air of unconventionality hovers around this still-life subject, in all its dark, muted splendor and shallow sense of space. Of course, avocados aren’t in the traditional palette of subjects in classical still-life painting. But the subject matter makes perfect, poetic sense in this avocado-rich region, giving Botke’s image a stubborn regional pride in addition to its elegance of expression.

Whether or not the artist--best known for flamboyant bird paintings and mural work--had any of this in mind, “Avocados” serves as a curiously magnetic nucleus in the show.

These images were culled by curator John Nichols from the collection of the city of Santa Paula, built up over more than 40 years from 1937 to 1979. 1937 marked the beginning of the annual Santa Paula Art Show, organized by rancher-artist Douglas Shively, noted architect Roy Wilson Sr. and Cornelius and Jessie Arms Botke. Back then, the show’s bylaws stipulated that artists had to focus on subject matter within an eight-mile radius of downtown Santa Paula. The rules loosened up as the show went on.

What we find in this exhibition, though, is less about regional, Santa Paula-oriented art than it is the story of a collection. Many of these images may be familiar to those who frequent the city’s public buildings, where they are hung. To see them in one place, in one gallery, gives a good overview of the healthy state of the collection.

Along the way, the show also tells the story of Southern Californian artists at mid-century, lured to the area for its light, its clement weather, to teach in such Los Angeles art schools as Otis and Chouinard and, not to forget, to work in Hollywood.

There are familiar Ventura County sights to be found, such as Robert Cole Caples’ “Ventura Farm,” an asymmetrically cropped image of a farm and mountains behind, as if seen through a depth-compressing lens.

Hanging just outside the gallery is Dan Toigo’s “Little Red Schoolhouse,” depicting the still-standing, still-red schoolhouse just east of Santa Paula on California 126. It’s an idyllic scene of small-town America for which Santa Paula has become famous. Hollywood comes here to tap into that strain of time-stands-still atmosphere.

Hollywood’s proximity to Santa Paula worked both ways. Some of the artists shown here found lucrative employment in the art niche of movie-making. Once off the Hollywood clock and movie lots, these artists often pursued more personal art concerns.

Emil Kosa Jr. worked in the special effects department at 20th Century-Fox and earned an Academy Award for his work on “Cleopatra,” but what we see of his art here is “The Loop,” a city scene in which the urban life is portrayed as a pernicious swirl of energy, threatening to entangle itself in knots of its own devising.

Charles Payzant was a commercial illustrator for Walt Disney and did backgrounds for “Fantasia” and “Pinocchio.” In this exhibition, Payzant is represented by “The White House,” a benevolent depiction of a tree-shrouded, white clapboard house, such as you might find in the rural America envisioned by Walt Disney and/or Norman Rockwell.

Another well-known artist in this group is Paul Lauritz, the Norwegian-born, Los Angeles-based pillar of the “Eucalyptus School” of California painters. His “Norway Fiord” and “Winter Landscape” reveal a sensitivity to rugged outdoor subjects.

One thread of continuity in the show is its leaning toward wistful Americana. Paul Starrett’s “Home from School” romanticizes the texture of a drawling, bucolic life in which children saunter home from school and yellow sunbursts of color burst on the trees like small-town epiphanies.

The immigrant family under the shade of a tree in Loren Barton’s “New Land” is depicted with the poetic, metaphorical realism of Thomas Hart Benton and his Depression-era ilk.

Dan Toigo shows a sense of clarity and an appreciation for a kind of sentimental Americana tinged with melancholy, a la Edward Hopper. His “Farm House” is an unpopulated form, basking in late afternoon sunlight, flanked by a lone, gnarled tree. Toigo’s “Barn at Gault” finds a leviathan barn and a lazy stretch of untended grass in the foreground.

Shows taken from collections often face the problem of dealing with available resources, out of which cogent themes aren’t always easily uncovered. Suffice to say, this exhibition offers a diversity of perspectives, more from a comfortable midriff than a cutting edge of artistic expression. Once you’ve taken in the scenery, check back in with Botke’s “Avocados” for a bit of introspective quirkiness.

Details

* WHAT: “Watercolors from the Santa Paula Collection.”

* WHEN: 10 a.m.-4 p.m Thursday through Sunday, through May 28.

* WHERE: Union Oil Museum, 1001 E. Main St., Santa Paula.

* HOW MUCH: Free.

* CALL: 933-0076.