Sticks and Stones : Familiar taunts and insults take on a new dimension in Lucinda Luvaas’ ‘Voices.’

Painters create worlds. Sometimes they’re awfully familiar.

Hardly an adult living in the noxious ‘90s would have trouble recognizing the feelings at the heart of Lucinda Luvaas’ most recent series of 30 paintings, “Familiar Voices.” On view as part of a 15-year, 70-piece retrospective of her work of the same name at Mythos Gallery, they combine text with colorful, vibrant, zany images to humorously address the slights and insults people thoughtlessly throw at one another.

“You’re So Fat,” screams one work, with an image of an accuser who is decidedly more plump than her target. “You Want Too Much,” declares another painting, while another commands, “Don’t Be So Sensitive.” An audiotape accompanying the series conveys the music in the spoken word with five modulated voices performing, in an ensemble somewhat like chamber music, several of the taunts and sayings.

In creating earlier work, it was usually an image that appeared to Luvaas first, before any text. “I had never worked with text so intimately before,” said the San Diego County resident. But with this series, “I’d hear a line and I had an image. I did not censor my mind at all. It was important to do them quickly, not to mull.”

Luvaas began to contemplate the insensitive homilies people impart so freely a little more than a year ago, spurred on by a tragic situation in her family. She started a list of phrases that had had an impact on her over the years. Friends followed with contributions from their experiences. She gathered more than 100 lines.

“I was looking for lines that resonate in a universal way,” Luvaas said. “The list was like a survey of societal attitudes and prejudices. The point of ‘Voices’ is to try to go from the personal to the societal and see how we are shaped by these attitudes and prejudices. While doing these drawings, I wanted to show how ludicrous [they are], making fun but also [conveying their] seriousness.”

Glen Doll, the owner of Mythos Gallery, said, “It’s obvious enough that they deal with painful matters, but they’re not vitriolic.”

However, Luvaas said her painting “has always had a dramatic edge to it.”

Doll chose to present Luvaas’ retrospective, the first solo show at Mythos since he opened the gallery in 1994, because it represents “an immense volume of really good work,” he said. “You seldom get an artist who’s both prolific and very attentive to all the details in her work. It never looks cranked out.”

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In addition to the “Familiar Voices” paintings and their corresponding hand-colored, multiple-edition images--made from drawings scanned into and printed from a computer--the exhibit presents four other series. A selection of wall sculptures dates between 1989 and 1995. Constructed, primed and painted with oils, they range from the structured “Pawns in the Game” to the more supple-looking “The Enchanted Palm.”

In 1989, Luvaas also started a “Carnival” series of paintings, etchings and drawings that, like “Familiar Voices,” displays personal and societal observations. For her, the carnival serves as a metaphor for an important aspect of the American psyche: “a duality between joyful liberation alongside the excesses of violence and puritanism.”

Dreams and real-life experiences form the basis of her “Witness” series, in which a little girl witnesses events. Nude figures appear in varied contexts, from the ominous “Don’t Take Candy From Strangers”--in which we are confronted with the potential of child abuse--to a sweet view of a group of young girls eyeing a young boy who has dropped his pants in “Playing House.”

Luvaas’ “Faces” series (1980-85) of paintings on paper were created spontaneously from her imagination while working on large public art projects in New York, she said. Unlike the portrait pieces of “Familiar Voices,” several of the paintings in this series depict groups of faces, and they appear more ghostly than lively.

“I have destiny as my shadow constantly, and a strong sense of the ephemeral nature of our existence,” Luvaas said.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Familiar Voices: Lucinda Luvaas.”

Location: Mythos Gallery, 1009 W. Olive Ave., Burbank.

Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday. Ends June 3.

Call: (818) 843-3686.