Color and Whimsy Dominate Mixed-Media Works

Mixed-media artwork can be a catch-all creative zone, in which artists of no particular focus are allowed free rein. With that freedom comes the tendency of veering either toward unchecked frivolity or fetishistic obsession.

For Wendy Herold Hower, featured at the Buenaventura Gallery, the end results go in both directions.

Her cheerful paste-up of colors and shapes approaches Technicolor giddiness in “Rainbow Kids in the Country Mart,” while “Foggy Dunes” is a more subdued, impressionistic landscape study, enhanced by the rough, pulpy paper supporting it.

Hower often broaches potentially heavy subjects with a light touch. “El Nino” bathes in dark whimsy in its portrayal of objects and sights sent into a tumultuous tailspin by the much-ballyhooed geothermal voodoo of its title. Similarly, “Rethinking the Universe,” with its dizzy swirl of interstellar activity, suggests an attitude of cosmic kitsch. It’s all in a mixed-media day’s work.

Meanwhile, in the outer gallery where Buenaventura Art Assn. members exhibit their wares, the standouts include the simple pleasures of Eleanor Swartz’s “Potting Shed” and Charlene Miller’s “Two Trees,” a spartan watercolor landscape. In “Sanchez Hardware, Ca. 1921,” Dorothy Holmes presents a facsimile of a wall, with stenciled text on faux brick evoking nostalgia.

Charles Rush waxes festive with his “Pepper Tree,” replete with lights. It’s a seasonal and buoyant piece, while Celeste Jaeger’s “Empty and Full” is uncharacteristically cerebral--two uneven panels juxtapose murky, shadowy imagery and quasi-foliated abstraction, in a way that embraces the inherent duality.

* Wendy Herold Hower, through Dec. 13 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; (805) 648-1235.