VENTURA COUNTY WEEKEND : SIGHTS : New Techniques, Ideas Infuse Watercolors

Watercolorists must endure their fair share of dismissive appraisals and unfair typecasting. While the medium itself is accessible enough to encourage amateurs, it isn’t inherently the domain of light-hearted, Sunday painting dabblers.

Case in point: the three-artist show at Wheeler Hot Springs. Sherry Loehr, Eve Riser-Roberts and Stephanie Elise-Kelch invest new ideas and technical fortitude in a medium that suffers a reputation for shallowness.

Multimedia artist Loehr, especially, is onto something disarmingly special with her genteel works. She is a patient observer, a still-life painter at heart, who brings obvious affection to depictions of fruit, which are then juxtaposed with bits of text or wallpaper or other decorative overlays.

She incorporates newspaper snippets or headlines in the manner of the Cubists, as a nod to the information in her field of vision or memory, rather than as a matter of an aesthetic game or socio-politicized commentary.

“Red Onions” pits sumptuous vegetable orbs against a shiny, ornate wallpaper effect as a backdrop, while the title of “The Ways of Dreams” hints at an operative unconscious energy in her work.

Riser-Roberts shows an unusually rich, deft way with the fluid rustle of watercolor, particularly when she’s depicting the shimmery translucent quality of colored glass. In this selection, she leans toward Oriental designs and subjects, from purely decorative elan to koi studies.

In some ways the most straightforward of the three, Elise-Kelch brings a more traditional watercolor approach, with her loose-handed representations of floral subjects. Flowers, fruit, and fish rarely looked so good.

* Sherry Loehr, Eve Riser-Roberts, and Stephanie Elise-Kelch through Jan. 7 at Wheeler Hot Springs in Ojai; 646-8131.