Image Makers : ArtWalk visitors enjoy free expression and get to see pros’ work.

Last Saturday’s ArtWalk in Ventura fulfilled its purpose, as usual, luring crowds to check out art, performances, and, well, just to get out. There was an added component this time around: Public art, in the truest sense, reared its head.

Specifically, the public was invited to work on the block-long mural on the temporary wall around the construction site of the Ventura Cinema. On Saturday, the Andean group Markahuasi issued its exotica for the benefit of painters and onlookers, and the mural took shape--a series of butterflies materialized along the wall.

In the dodgy realm of art in public spaces, such innocent iconography was fit-to-order. Who is going to complain about butterflies, especially when the image is inherently temporary? And especially when the public sector itself helped paint the thing?

Much of the ArtWalk traffic spilled over from the closed-off block into the neighboring Natalie’s Fine Threads, whose upstairs gallery has become an important and nicely used space for local artists in the last year. Currently, the space is hosting sculpture by Bob Eyberg and paintings by Aimee French.

Eyberg’s “Box Full of Sunrise” serves as an introduction to the show. It is a 3-D construction of a recurring motif in his current work, a rectangle balanced on four legs, suggesting some variation on a box, a table, and a study in geometric invention.

We see the same image again in a relief piece dubbed “Crop Circle Dentistry,” set against a base of wavy glass and surrounded by a cryptic ring of spheres. Its appeal is based on a sense of self-defined mystery.

French is known for her iridescent paintings on silk, with their semi-abstract brilliance. That aspect of her work is represented here by such pieces as “Purple Tunnel” and the triptych “Time Line,” which alludes to a life line carrying through a baby carriage, the slow-burning flames of time’s passage, and a dark headboard to finish.

On more traditional painting turf, French also shows pieces from her “Home” series, in which houses are freed from their moorings and flung into the air, tethered to ribbons, and essentially lost in space. The obvious cultural reference point of this motif--something to do with Dorothy and Toto, too--is faced head-on in “Not in Kansas Anymore.” We could read into these images metaphors of uncertainty and dislocation, but the paintings are just light and breezy enough to keep angst on the sidelines.

* Sculptures by Bob Eyberg and paintings by Aimee French, through Aug. 22 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, 596 E. Main St. in Ventura. 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday, noon-4 p.m., Sunday; (805) 643-8854.

Found in Space: Meanwhile, a new impromptu art space was born in the empty building across Santa Clara Street from Buenaventura Gallery. Here, members of the San Buenaventura Artists’ Union set up shop in a few offices transformed into galleries. Here, we caught work by Lynn Morley, showing a series of raw-yet-lively sketches from a trip to Moscow, in a room shared by d.m. Spaulding and Jane McKinney, a group showing of Buenaventura Art Assn. heads, and Ginger Moore Maxwell.

It’s another example of what could be deemed a trend in the Ventura art scene in the last few years, making healthy, constructive use of otherwise dormant spaces for the sake of art.

Other Art News: Speaking of making use of a dormant space, the Ventura College Friends of the Arts have mounted their third annual summer show at the College’s Gallery 2. It’s a friendly potpourri of an exhibition with no greater curatorial mandate than the sheer will to put on a show.

Among the highlights are Judee Hauer’s “Later On,” a wood assemblage evoking an urban scene with a woodsy playfulness, and Celeste Jaeger’s mixed media work, with its tactile roughness.

As subject matter goes, landscape and vegetation have a field day here, but the pieces that jump out of the pack are the oddest images, such as Paula Odor’s “Looking at Clover,” with its composition-engulfing grass pattern, and Judy Conway’s “California Gold,” a strangely appealing out-of-focus landscape painting.

Debra McKillop, the faculty member who has brought the fine roster of art shows to the college this past season, impresses with her “Predawn Imagination.” As suggested in the title, there’s a dreamlike logic at work in this dim-lit, mystical interior scene.

* Ventura College Friends of the Arts, Third Annual Art Exhibition, through July at Ventura College Gallery 2, 4667 Telegraph Road in Ventura. Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.-8:30; Saturday 11 a.m.-2 p.m.; (805) 642-6260.