SIGHTS : War and Peace Come Together at Art Exhibit : Beatrice Wood’s peaceful drawings and images of the aircraft of WWII are on display at museum in Santa Paula.

All is fair in love and war. Such is the unintentional message over at Santa Paula’s Union Oil Museum, where fighter-plane fetishism and Dadaist whimsy are sharing space. Heroic Images of World War II are hanging out with definitively peace-loving drawings of everyone’s favorite artistic centenarian, Beatrice Wood.

Wood’s drawings amount to gentle bursts of whimsy, concocted with naive--in the best sense--and childlike simplicity. She reserves the right to display lightly salted attacks on authority, as in “Kids Laughing at Cops on the Highway.”

The benign, potentially lethal view offered in “New York” finds falling people and objects, but as in a dream rather than a nightmare. She also views social realities from odd angles, i.e. legs under a table, another child’s eye view of life.

Interspersed with the drawings are bits of text from her book of aphorisms, “Playing Chess with the Heart.” One excerpt, fitting in this context, reads: “Around 80% of our technical genius is focused on destruction, on killing. Beings from outer space must be laughing at us.”

The absurdist art movement of Dadaism--to which Wood has been not altogether accurately attached--arose largely as a response to the atrocities of modern warfare as experienced during World War I. The grotesque absurdities of trench warfare triggered a movement that celebrated the liberation from rationality and complacent philosophical certainties.

Is Wood the “mama of Dada”-- a theme belabored in a misguided documentary on Wood? Not really. She has merely tapped into a timeless vein of non-linear, irreverent thinking that excites the seedbed of a lively art.

The “Homefront Santa Paula” show features nostalgic memorabilia from the era and the paraphernalia of wartime. A poster concerning the shortage of paper for the war effort suggests that people “save a bundle a week, save some boy’s life.”

A gallery full of aviation art lionizes the sleek, airborne instruments of warfare, including affectionate airplane paintings by Matt Jeffries, a Hollywood set designer famous for having designed the USS Enterprise for TV’s original “Star Trek.” The best work here is that of legendary photojournalist Horace Bristol, a Santa Paula native who will be the subject of a large-scale exhibition in this Museum in October.

Bristol’s graceful scenes of WWII planes, against lyrical backdrops of ocean, clouds, and land belie the nature of their missions.

Details

* EXHIBITS: “Homefront Santa Paula” and “Drawings in Motion,” through Sept. 10 at the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum, 1001 E. Main St. in Santa Paula; 933-0076.