As Timely Exhibitions Go, This One Has Bite

Hot diggety dog art!

With last week’s opening of Disney’s live-action “101 Dalmatians” remake, dogs, it seems, are in. Now, hot on its paws--or at least nipping at its heels--comes an exhibition at Golden West College’s Fine Arts Gallery titled “Dogs in Form and Image.”

Good planning? The luck of the Irish . . . setter? Or just plain serendipity?

“There’s no tie-in to the movie at all,” maintained curator Donna Sandrock, who has only a little Irish blood and in fact owns a terrier. “My husband even said, ‘How did you do this, the timing?’ I didn’t intend to do this at all.”

The exhibition’s scholarly-sounding title, originally rendered in Latin (Canis, forma et imago), may simply refer to the fact that the show includes both two- and three-dimensional works. Twenty-five artists are represented.

“I had to cut it off at 25,” Sandrock said somewhat dogmatically. “All of the artists I talked to were very interested in showing.

“Sometimes we got into this personal area, where they were willing to show work they wouldn’t normally do for their art market, that they wouldn’t normally show in a gallery. . . . It was more like, ‘Oh yes, I have a dog painting; in fact, this is my dog!’--and I would see these really wonderful works. It was not a question of quality.”

Sandrock may insist that the art world hasn’t gone to the dogs, but many of the artists with works on display do normally focus on their four-legged friends.

Celebrated Weimaraner chronicler William Wegman is represented by an early Polaroid photograph, of his dog Fay with two pairs of boots on backward, and by two videos from the 1970s, “Semi Buffet” and “Grey Hairs.” (Tim Burton’s “Frankenweenie” and a “Dog Faces” video will alternate continuously on a second monitor.)

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Kerri Sabine-Wolf of Orange, who by her very name seems destined for a career in canine art, has contributed an imposing diptych of a large dog about to jump through a flaming hoop (the hoop is on a separate canvas about four feet away). Whimsical contemporary wood sculptures of four breeds, life-size, by James Lawrence of Los Angeles provide something of a centerpiece for the show.

You might say that several Expressionist paintings by Douglas Humble of Santa Monica have bite; the artist no doubt hopes they’ll get under your skin and not let go.

“Somebody told me, word of mouth, that there’s this guy who does vicious dogs,” Sandrock said. “I said, ‘Well, I could use some vicious dogs for my exhibit.’ I went to [Humble’s] studio, and he had 50 paintings there, enough to fill this whole gallery, all of vicious dogs. . . . The yellow dog is always attacking the man in the blue suit, and the man in the blue suit is always a skull.”

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Humble actually owns a black lab, raising a number of possibilities for interpretations based on the dog’s psychological shadow.

But the biggest question raised by the show is far less complicated.

“Everybody’s asking me if I’m also going to do a cat show,” Sandrock said.

And . . ?

“I’ve had cats all my life, but I don’t know if the cat image is as strong as the dog image when it comes to art,” she said, adding that the query is getting mildly annoying. “At one point, I told some people that the best cats in art have been in Egyptian tombs.”

* “Dogs in Form and Image” continues through Dec. 20 at Golden West College’s Fine Arts Gallery, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday, plus 6-9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Free. (714) 892-7711, Ext. 58356.