SIGHTS / VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : Shows Focus on Revered Names Synonymous With Ojai Area : The ceramic work of Beatrice Wood and the photojournalism of Horace Bristol reflect the celebrated artists’ enduring legacies.

The stars have aligned over the Ventura County art scene and a theme has emerged: Ojai’s seasoned art luminaries.

It’s not that there is much artistic overlap between the sly, commanding ceramic work of Beatrice Wood (at Ventura County Museum of History and Art) and the compassionate, artful photojournalism of Horace Bristol (at Santa Paula Union Oil Museum). Both are internationally known veteran artists who have settled in the idyllic valley. Their names have become synonymous with Ojai.

Neither artist has hidden from view nor detached from the surrounding community; we’ve seen plenty of their work in various regional venues in recent years. What makes these shows especially significant is their scope as well as the implicit reminder that these artists are precious resources who aren’t getting any younger.

Assembled with typical care by curator Tim Schiffer, “Beatrice Wood . . . a la carte” is a fascinating glimpse at the artist’s ceramic work that is, theoretically, functional as dinnerware. Utility, though, is the last thing we think of when admiring a flamboyantly iridescent rooster bowl, “Mr. and Mrs. Teapot,” some fish plates or other carefully crafted objets d’art.

Though limited in size by the gallery’s space, the show covers a sprawling slice of Wood’s history, from an atypically mild-mannered plate from 1933--the year she first produced ceramics--to work she did as a centenarian in the 1990s.

Scattered among the pieces are selected quotes from her books, which help to flesh out the portrait of the artist as a wry, free spirit who has never settled into a complacent retirement.

At age 102, Wood--who has lived in Ojai since 1948--still lives to work and abides by a philosophy of renegade sensuality. Regarding her range of personal interests, she writes, “I am so passionately responsive to art that gentlemen, by comparison, seem passive pastimes, fun to laugh at--at least so I say.”

Wood went to India in 1962 as a cultural ambassador and came back with a reconfirmed interest in things Indian. We sense it in her contemplative nature and see it in her sartorial style, as with the salmon-colored sari she wears in a beautiful portrait by photographer Bill Dow. Dow’s black-and-white images of Wood at work can also be seen in the museum’s back hallway.

In much of her work, Wood betrays her love of animals and animal nature. Cats, with their fickle, sensuous qualities, appear on her plates, and she often portrays human figures with a kind of feline delicacy. Part of what distinguishes Wood’s ceramic work is a detectable sense of play and adventure.

Much--maybe too much--has been made of Wood’s historical link to the world of Dada, as a lover of Marcel Duchamp and other European scene makers early in the century. It is true, though, that Wood’s essential approach to art, even in her purely nonrepresentational ceramics, entails a balance of objectivity and levity.

She writes, “My gambling instincts are satisfied by working in luster glazes, because I can never predict how they will come out.” Courting unpredictability may be one of Wood’s secrets to longevity.

Images of an Epoch: Ojai may have been his home for many years now, but as the exhibition “Welcome Home Horace Bristol” points out, the photographer has roots in Santa Paula.

He lived in the town as a child and later, briefly, in the ‘30s, after he had sold a newspaper he owned in Piru. From there, Bristol was off around the world entrenched in the burgeoning genre of photojournalism as popularized by Life magazine.

Selected smatterings of Bristol’s work have been seen around the county in recent years, including a show at the Ventura County Museum, which focused on his World War II imagery two years ago. But this generous survey of Bristol’s work is the largest yet in his home county.

When it comes to Bristol, who spanned the globe and several decades, only a large show such as this can do justice to the spectrum of his work.

The show includes familiar, celebrated aspects of his work, including images from the photo essay on California migrant farm workers that led would-be collaborator John Steinbeck to write “Grapes of Wrath.”

These are legendary photos, slices of humanity that sear into the memory. “Mrs. Sandy, Religious Fanatic,” for instance, captures a look in the eye, part benevolence, part desperation.

Bristol spent time in Asia and Indonesia, producing some of his more artfully composed and timeless images. The eerie caldron of barely clad, ritualistic celebrants in “Kwannon Temple” and the bracing clarity of “Heads of Japanese Dolls” leap out for attention.

So does the startling, slightly skewed image he calls “Whistle,” from the Santa Paula-based photo essay “Oil in California” that he did for Fortune magazine early in his career.

Some of this exhibition’s more revealing work comes from early in Bristol’s career. The show includes photography he did for the Santa Paula High School yearbook in 1933, and several of the children’s portraits he did to get by before his journalistic career began in earnest.

In the other gallery, we see his 1992 series, “The Haunted Refinery,” from an abandoned oil refinery in Ventura, a ghost from the past--perhaps a symbol of depleted resources. Hardly an apologist for the oil industry, Bristol saw in oil machinery and the industrial landscape an intriguing array of angles and patterns.

As this exhibition amply shows, Bristol’s lifelong scene has been ever-shifting, filled with human interest and surveyed by a vigilant eye.

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DETAILS “Beatrice Wood . . . a la carte”

* WHERE: Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St., Ventura.

* WHEN: Through February.

* CALL: 653-0323.

“Welcome Home, Horace Bristol”

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

* WHEN: Through Jan. 7.

* CALL: 933-0076.