Baring of Souls : Two artists mine very different sources of inspiration--Jewish heritage and the contemplation of what lasts and what’s lost.

Some artists paint the people, places and things around them. Others make pictures from the contemplations of their minds and souls.

Diane August and Deborah Kashinsky are two artists who convey their inner workings with artist’s tools. Though their sources of inspiration are different, and their paintings reflect different artistic techniques, both artists share the desire to open up paths of discovery and understanding for themselves--and for anyone else who wants to come along--through their art.

One can journey through their work in two solo exhibits at the Brand Library Art Galleries. “Deborah Kashinsky: Paintings,” 12 oil-on-canvas paintings and four pencil-on-paper drawings, shares space with “Diane August: Soul, Time and Light.”

Divided into three sections, August’s exhibit presents mixed-media sculptures of which willow branches are an integral part; an installation of willow branches that float above the center of the gallery, contributing a peaceful, natural atmosphere to the room, and her most recent work, “Through the Veils Are the Fragments.”

This last segment, composed of a multitude of small, square, non-representational paintings, has been arranged on one wall of the gallery in a non-symmetrical, playful way. The colorful, multilayered paintings, achieved through alternately painting and sanding, were partially motivated by recent trips to archeological sites in Israel and Greece.

“I started building painting upon painting upon painting, layering and sanding through to see what I could see underneath,” August said. “I wanted to explore my own archeology.”

She refers to her Jewish heritage as something apart from Jewish culture and religious ritual. Rather, she said, it’s “a deep exploration of who I am as a spiritual Jew.” In her artistic statement she writes, “I crave the memories that my Jewish soul remembers. I am drawn to find these memories, so I call on sacred Jewish liturgy and Kabalist writings and meditations.”

In spiritual Jewish mysticism, she said, “there is no sense of time and space.”

A painting of hers contains “all time, but it has no time. I play with the idea of how an Earth person conceives of time and space.”

Every layer “starts with a prayer, meditation or chant,” August said. From that come Hebrew letters or words that form the basis of the paintings and influence their shapes and colors.

The word “Fragments” in the title serves as a “metaphor for the transitoriness of my ancestors,” August writes. “Veils,” she said, harks back to mystical concepts that suggest veils exist between us and God to “protect us from the intensity of bright light, the Divine.”

August feels that in our time there is an “impoverishment of the spiritual, the psychological, the ancestral.” Her search into these things and expression of that search in art is something “I’ve come up with that works for me.” In the process of painting and sanding, “of removing what isn’t important, you never know what you’re going to find in there. It’s like opening presents, or the present.”

Kashinsky’s artistic travel has been somewhat more concrete. While August delved into ancient mystical ideas, Kashinsky found her way home.

After a long period spent making what she called “mound” paintings--images of things like fish, hands, mouths and hearts piled up in heaps--she determined that she did not know how to render form. To rectify the problem, she spent a year in her studio in the late 1980s just drawing forms, mainly fruits and rock piles. Intuitively, she began to put those together, placing fruits within the rock formations.

Some time after an artist friend pointed out that the rock forms looked like overstuffed velvet easy chairs, she began to make paintings of chairs, incorporating fruit or fish into the chair image. The fish were specifically rainbow trout--which she used to catch, clean and eat when she camped in the Sierra--or salmon and salmon eggs that symbolize the life cycle and her own connection with nature.

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As she goes along, Kashinsky said, “Things seem to gel as to what the paintings mean.”

“The permanent rocks protect the more temporal fish and fruit. Then I started bringing in the chair, a domestic symbol of home, to take comfort and rest in, to deal with the struggles of life and death.”

In her boldly colorful, oddly humorous representational images, it is not only the juxtaposition of objects that is distinctive. The scale of fruit or fish to chair is also unrealistic, giving each object and the compositions themselves a somewhat surreal presence. Though she may play with the conventions of the still life, her emphasis is personal and profound. Like anyone else, she experiences life’s transitory pleasures and grief. At the same time, as an artist, she said, “I take tremendous comfort in and I’m supported by the home.”

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Diane August: Soul, Time and Light,” “Deborah Kashinsky: Paintings.”

Location: Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale.

Hours: 1 to 9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 1 to 6 p.m. Wednesday and 1 to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Ends May 30.

Call: (818) 548-2051.