Natural Strength of Joe Goode

Small-scale versions of Joe Goode’s recent nature-based abstract paintings are the main event at Peter Blake Gallery through March 30. These moodily gaseous color studies and shotgun-blasted pieces will look familiar to those who have seen the Goode exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach (through April 13).

The works on paper, which similarly invoke such atmospheric events and elements as forest fires, tornadoes and the ozone layer, unfortunately lack the all-important environmental vastness of the paintings (which this viewer finds less memorable than Goode’s signature work from the 1960s).

In cooperation with L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice, the gallery also is showing a sampling of work by other Los Angeles artists, mostly from Goode’s generation.

Among the highlights are Ed Moses’ recent painting “Ebolg #6” (planetary imagery in the night sky mingling with the soft, shimmering color of dreams), tiny bronze versions of a couple of Peter Shelton’s inimitable sculptures combining human and garment forms, and a luscious John McCracken (“High Sky,” a glossy red slab of fiberglass-covered wood that begs to be hung higher on the wall to evoke the dusk image suggested in the title).

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Some viewers may be equally attracted by the work of a rising artist from a younger Los Angeles generation: David Lloyd. Painted on canvas or Mylar, Lloyd’s untitled quasi-abstractions often combine stacked, overlapped or humorously squashed organic shapes with recognizable imagery (a faucet, a lamp, a finger).

Luminous color, inventive shapes (a teasing protrusion emerges from a Shelton-esque arm shape; a mint-green rectangle grows tendril-like furniture legs) and a mischievously decorative sensibility that rarely becomes cloying give these paintings a lively appeal.

* Work by several L.A. artists, through March 30 at Peter Blake Gallery, 326 N. Pacific Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Free. (714) 376-9994.