Paintings of Past Nothing but Pleasant

Alex Ross is a self-taught late bloomer in the world of art. He picked up painting only after retiring from a working life that included photography, and now stands proudly outside the hallowed confines of the established art world. He may be, as the title of his current show suggests, an “American primitive,” but his art speaks across lines of cultural demarcation.

Ross’ powerfully affecting work, now showing in the main gallery of the Brand Library, is enhanced by the warmly lit and generous space. In an age of clever post-modern tactics in art, Ross’ works are almost too good, too pure, to be true. The viewer may be tempted to penetrate the sweet surfaces of these pictures and find a cynical core, an ironic punch line. It’s a futile effort.

Ross, born in 1918, is a spinner of simple, touching anecdotes from his own past, translated into images of folk funk, recalling Henri Rousseau--an admitted influence--and folk art icon Grandma Moses. But Ross’ world of simple, charmingly awkward images is filtered not through sentimentality or some fantasy perception, but through the bittersweet prism of memory.

These images, painted in the ‘80s and ‘90s but mostly looking back to his childhood in the ‘20s through young adulthood in the ‘40s, are referred to as “memory paintings,” drawn from his friendly, and no doubt romanticized, bank of recollections. Belying the kindly images, with their pleasant explanatory texts, are the harsher facts of Ross’ life: his childhood spent in foster homes and an orphanage, life in the Bronx (which he equates with small-town amiability in days of yore) and life during wartime, the horrors and triumphs of World War II.

Remarkably little bitterness or world-weariness creeps into the images, fashioned without any pretense of a realist’s fastidiousness. Everything is disarmingly askew, from the clunky figures to the distorted sense of depth and proportion and the flat blocks of color. And yet everything is confident in presentation, a world unto itself as defined by its own logic and charm.

His compositions are usually busy and bustling, but never anxious. He celebrates the syncopated rhythms of rural life and its flux of seasons. There he is, either ice skating or skinny dipping--depending on the season--in the water-filled quarry in Pleasantville, N.Y. (a perfect name for the town of his youth). And look at him there, a pint-size kid fetching a pail of beer from Mahoney’s Saloon in the Bronx, unaware of any oddity in the task.

Innocence is the running motif in the episodic narrative connecting this group of paintings, all the way to adolescence. In the accompanying text for “Spin the Bottle,” he explains that he was “too bashful to participate.” Sex makes other coy appearances in the show, as in “A Man’s Fantasy,” with nude women--misshapen, of course--chasing an apparently shy, reluctant and naked man around a pond.

“Why would five maidens chase a naked man?” he writes, playfully. “Not on this planet unless that man stole their hearts. This can only be a vision of a man’s fantasy.”

Ross also views urban life, for all its antsy intensity, with a similar glowing eye, as with “Subway, Rush Hour,” its populace in frenetic motion, but happily so.

Of course, the more sobering subtext of this fond remembrance, circa the mid-’30s, is the implicit contrast with the current squalor of the same New York City scene, with its graffiti and aroma of urine.

The past sometimes interjects with the present in other ways, as with “Battle of the Big Bands at the Savoy,” a 1996 painting paying tribute to the night Ross was introduced to Ella Fitzgerald in the famed Harlem ballroom. Fitzgerald died just as Ross was finishing this painting, one of the very few not for sale.

Underscoring these fascinating paintings is a sense of sadness for what once was, the residue of the past. One gets the feeling that Ross doesn’t have the aesthetics of folk art or American primitivism in mind when he puts brush to surface (usually a board). He’s after the elusive parade of images marching through his mind.

In a statement, he writes: “Memories are the only thing we take with us when we leave this planet, and the memories in my paintings are the ones I will leave behind for the coming generations.”

He’s on a mission, in other words, to get it all down, and the results are quietly captivating. This is clearly one of the finest shows mounted in the Valley this year.

Something Different: Jeanne Jo L’Heureux’s paintings, in the hallway gallery at the Brand, couldn’t be more different in approach or sentiment than those of Ross. The work in her “Aftershocks” series was reviewed as part of a group show at the Century Gallery last spring, but is seen in greater quantity and variety this time.

Her art is about fissures and instability, in abstractions in which massive dark areas are interrupted by cracks and jagged divisions. These amount to literal visual characteristics--nervous edges and dangerous cleavages in the middle of the compositions--but also take on metaphorical baggage.

The artist sees the works as emblems of a series of personal traumas she confronted in the last several years: earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles; the L.A. riots; her father’s death. Knowing this, the images assume the weight of laments, but they function as abstractions as well.

* “Alex Ross: American Primitive Paintings” and Jeanne Jo L’Heureux, through Oct. 29 at the Brand Library, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Gallery hours: 1-9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday; 1-6 p.m. Wednesday; 1-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday; (818) 548-2051.

Crossing Over: Judging from his show at Granados 2 Gallery, Rudy Caldera has a diversity of interests, and is striving to connect the dots of an emerging aesthetic.

The artist, a Costa Rican living in Los Angeles, shows detailed sculptures of languid, sensuous nudes. But his two-dimensional works lean more toward simple abstracted imagery--swirling vortexes drawn freely on paper, and then attached to rough wood mattes that have been glazed over.

We also find portraits of women’s proud faces in profile, carved into wood, relief-like, and then painted, to cross the line between sculpture and painting.

“Luminous Spheres Over Silverlake,” meanwhile, conveys innocent, whimsical charm in its depiction of luminous yellow ovals--benign visitations over L.A., we’re led to assume. The various ingredients in the show hang together, but by a thread.

* Rudy Caldera, “Love Transcendence,” through Oct. 12 at Granados 2 Gallery, 3221 Glendale Blvd., Atwater Village. Gallery hours: 6-9 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday; (213) 662-9930.