Potent Watercolor : Show of work from the 1930-40s belies usual notions of the medium.

With all due respect to the noble and time-honored medium of watercolor, we don’t often associate it with innovation. We rarely find the phrase “cutting edge” in the same sentence with watercolor. The medium tends to be stuck in the modest and traditional realm of Sunday painters and visual pleasantries.

Visitors to the Ventura County Museum of History and Art will find watercolor work of a different color and energy. The fascinating show called “California Style, 1930s and ‘40s” paints a picture--in watercolor--of artistic and socio-historical vitality. The show was curated by David and Susan Stary-Sheets and arrives here from the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, where it originated, after a stop in Orange County.

This is work from a time when the trying conditions and tensions of the Great Depression and World War II bumped up against a dynamic spirit of change, and California was the promised land seeking its promise. The Golden State was a ripe subject for painters, some of whom were sanctioned by the WPA, in the throes of American art celebrating America.

This art chronicles a landscape in a dramatic state of flux and growth. California, particularly our Southern neck of the state, found itself in a upward spiral of development and population expansion.

Although there are scenes of relatively bucolic splendor and spaciousness, as with Millard Sheets’ tranquil “Near Riverside,” just outside the gallery, or Mary Blair’s “Lowing Herd,” with cows blandly lurking beneath a fiery red twilight sky, the more potent subject is the urban jungle as work in progress. Sheets’ own gruffly charming painting, “Burns Bros.” depicts, with a kind of admiring, funky geometry, a dump truck in an industrial section of town, all lop-sided rectangles and crisscrossing lines.

Wilder crosshatching appears in Dong Kingman’s image of construction in San Francisco or George Post’s “Bay Bridge Under Construction,” dense, rhythmic pieces all about the transformation of chaos yielding to order, the nature of urban planning. Phil Dike’s “Morning, Inspiration Corner,” also from 1932, is an industrialized landscape, almost pushed by its natural design into abstraction. It’s a maze of structures and lines, and with a train slicing diagonally, like an afterthought, through the thicket.

In John Healey’s “Gas” and Post’s “Speedway Alley,” the emphasis is on translating the city’s kinetic pace and confusion into the type of vibrant, stylized imagery that Stuart Davis liked to invent. On a local note, Phil Paradise’s “Oil Fields on the Mesa, Santa Barbara,” from 1932, shows a rickety apparatus in a region now given over to suburbia.

WWII is represented mostly on the home front, as in Paradise’s cozy painting of citizens in the comforts of a cramped, cozy living room, preparing CARE packages for those on the front lines. George Samerjan’s “Japanese Evacuation” suggests faceless activity of people being displaced by night, of lives being quietly uprooted.

By the standards of watercolor work, the paintings here may be daring, but their power resides in the original and spunky way they depict the narrative drama of their time and place.

BE THERE

“California Style, 1930s and ‘40s,” through Sunday at Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St., Ventura. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday; 653-0323.