The Natural

If you consider the bio of painter William Dorsey, now featured in a one-person exhibition at the Ojai Center for the Arts, all logical, linear assumptions are likely to get shuffled. His family landed in Ojai in 1952, and the artist remembers being perched in his treehouse, peering at the landmark Ojai post office tower, which he now lovingly depicts in paintings of his hometown.

Dorsey left home, veered toward Alaska, and, among other things, wrote tunes picked up by the Monkees and Tiny Tim. He landed back in Ojai in 1987 and has produced a prolific body of paintings, some of which have been ripe for framing and printing as posters celebrating the small-town splendors of Ojai.

But the works that most impress in this kindly, generous show are the landscape observations in and out of Ventura County. Dorsey favors the monumental form and drowsy foliage of eucalyptus trees, those commonplace oddities imported from Australia that dot the local terrain and which he paints with a muted palette and a sense of introspective moodiness. In “Coast Sunset,” he draws on a delicate balance of hues, with an orange-red backdrop to a stand of eucalyptus trees.

Sunlight at odd hours becomes a common theme, in paintings such as “Topa Topa Morning,” with its pinkish cast over a scene where the craggy face of the mountain looms in contrast to the sprawl of a meadow. More dramatically, he looks upward, sharply, in an unusual view of the post office tower, in “Ojai Tower Morning,” accented with harshly slanted shadows.

The tension between urban reality and natural allure is the obvious--too obvious--subject in “Sometimes It Feels Like This,” depicting a city scene with crashing ocean waves inserted in a doorway, a la the surrealist Magritte. The best stuff in this show deals with the world beyond development, or even human traffic. We get the sense of landscape painting tradition being treated as communion with a natural order of things.

* William Dorsey, “The California Landscape,” through October at Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St. in Ojai. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday; (805) 646-0117.

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Trees ‘n’ Things: On the subject of eucalyptus trees, their physical elements play a role in the assemblage works of Nora Yukon, now showcased in the main gallery of the Buenaventura Gallery. Yukon shows recent examples that extend her ongoing interest in found materials from nature, informed by a prominent, sympathetic strain of Native American culture.

Yukon creates impressionistic pieces from unlikely materials, rope, coral beads, wool, porcupine quills and that fragrant and familiar source, eucalyptus bark. Her general perspective, like that of Native American culture, is less pragmatic than mystical, as seen in pieces like “Shaman With Ram” and “Soaring to the Heavens.”

In Yukon’s almost two-dimensional works in this show, frenetic and dense imagery is adorned with such things as snakeskin, applied to hand-dyed paper. “The Birth of Time” combines fabric-weaving and assemblage techniques.

* “Gods of the Smaller Things,” a mixed-media spiritual art show by Nora Yukon, through Sept. 26 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St. in Ventura. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday; (805) 648-1235.

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Marble-ized Art: Art City II’s gallery these days is chockablock with hunks of stone, not unusual for this headquarters of decorative and artistically deployable stone. But whereas group exhibitions here often combine sculptures on the floor and two-dimensional work on the walls, stone is the thing in “Masters of Alabaster.”

Paul Lindhard’s male torso is a figure caught in the fragile transition between the artist’s chisel work and a finished form, while Jean Cherie’s figure is fully fleshed out, with humor intact: “An Abundant Angel” is a beer-bellied cherub.

The orange stone in Phil Flynn’s “The Flame” evokes seashell-like luminosity. Joanne Duby’s lily involves supple folds and curves in the effort to use stone to convey a floral subject. Martin Weiner’s “Ocean” prefers the amorphous entanglement of twisting lines. It’s about the spirit of waves rather than the literal image.

* “Masters of Alabaster,” through September at Art City II, 31 Peking St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday; (805) 648-1690.