In Retrospect

It has been a good season for catching the artwork of Gerd Koch, the Ventura College teacher and one of the most impressive painters calling Ventura County home. Recently, Koch was the subject of a small retrospective at the Third Floor Gallery of Ventura City Hall. Now comes another, larger retrospective at the Ojai Center for the Arts, “48 Years of Painting: 1951-1998, Part 2,” and it’s a must-see.

Through Koch’s synthesis of abstraction, landscape and mythology, and a natural technical flair, his work reaffirms the power of painting. We see the artist in diverse guises--from the dark introspection of “Self Portrait in Shadow,” circa 1960, to the rugged, behatted, outdoor figure in this year’s “Self Portrait With Hill.” In a different place entirely is “Self Portrait as an Algerian Bell Captain,” from 1974.

The open space of the Ojai Center gallery nicely complements Koch’s large canvases, such as “Summer’s Day,” a vibrant, unsentimental celebration of painting’s energy, and a fervent expression of the bridge between abstract instincts and reverence for landscape. In “Water Spirits,” ripples and reflections conspire to suggest a cool aura.

These larger canvases are the show’s core, but other smaller works fill in the picture of Koch’s aesthetic. In a darkened corner of the gallery is a bit of cheeky mysticism, self-explanatory in its subject matter: “Adam and Eve in Light Blue Shoes Visit the Statue of Liberty With Ice Cream Cone.”

Suddenly, Koch is all over the place, and he has hardly worn out his welcome.

* Gerd Koch, “48 Years of Painting: 1951-1998, Part 2,” through Aug. 26 at Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday; 646-0117.

*

Art and Cows, Coming Home: Some folks go to the Ventura County Fair for all the time-honored reasons--to touch base with living, breathing, real-time livestock, for instance. There is always the pleasant crush of people, the vertiginous whoosh of the fairway rides and nonthreatening musical culture (i.e. Neil Sedaka).

But some of us are drawn to the amateur art exhibition, this year tucked away in a corner by the pie display. A professional exhibition, in a separate building, is one thing, featuring artists from the area who we’ve seen circulating around area galleries during the year.

The amateur show, though, is its own precious entity. We can go there expecting fresh, humble insights, and affirmations: that art carries forth outside the de facto gallery scene, and that art can celebrate lifestyles outside the mainstream. That’s especially true in Ventura County, a last bastion of agricultural activity in Southern California, undergoing development and mall-ification as we speak.

There are no paeons to shopping malls here, needless to say. But we do find Lois Bloom’s watercolor views of skeletal farm equipment lazing around expansive properties, no fast-food joints in sight. Ardeth Jones pays wistful tribute to early life in Saticoy, with an 1889 scene of Smith Ranch and Saticoy’s first post office, at Wells and Telegraph roads.

John Colby’s simple, effective farm scene finds a band of fertile brown soil on the bottom, a thin horizontal stripe at the horizon line where the farmhouse sits, and the rest of the composition devoted to gently clouded skies overhead.

Pleasing oddities pop up here too. James Lockwood’s “Rainbow Stone Wall” is a composition stuffed with multicolored bricks. Kimberly A. Foukin’s abstract painting nods to the Jackson Pollock school of drips, splotches and the visual language of action, but with a creative twist: Broken shards of plastic foam cups jut up from the surface. Is this the result of too much coffee before heading into the studio?

One small, expressive piece is by R. Carver, depicting a father and son at a table. They appear to be bonding, tucked happily into a tight composition. Likewise, this embarrassment of modest artistic riches is crowded into a corner of the maze that is the county fair. It’s worth a look.