OUT & ABOUT : Sights : Palette of Artists : Carnegie Museum’s ‘Classic Competition’ showcases diversity of local talent.

There are a few perennial sources for getting a sense of the diversity of artistic activity going on in these parts. Group shows, while inevitably beholden to the biases of their jurors, offer a valuable finger on the pulse of what Ventura County artists are up to--and who they are.

For six years, the Carnegie Art Museum has hosted what it calls “A Classic Competition,” a friendly competition, really, now showing throughout the museum. Many of the mainstays of the local scene are represented and a few are singled out for juried plaudits.

This year’s winners are: first place to Jack Reilly in three-dimensional art for his “Landscape as Icon”; first place to Amy Kumler in photography for her photograph “Mexico”--a tiny portrait of an Airstream trailer brimming with arid wit; and first place in two-dimensional art to Bobbie Moline-Kramer for “Postcards From Earth, Fading.”

A judge’s choice award went to Paula Odor for her subtle watercolor “Thrift #2,” depicting garments glimpsed through the window of a thrift store--an ostensibly mundane subject turned jewel-like. We will be seeing more of Eve-Riser Roberts in this space, who received the director’s choice award and will be granted a one-person show in the gallery devoted to local artists.

The award list is one thing, the response from the public quite another. Walking past the art-bedecked walls, visitors are bound to have their own opinions, in and out of sync with the official rulings.

Gayel Childress’ view of the wonderfully rustic Lompoc Mission, “La Purisma,” is an engaging blend of fragmented composition and warm, irrational hues. It actually dates from 1989, when her painting included humble and ample nods to Matisse and Cezanne.

Two other painters, seen around town regularly but never wearing out their welcome, harness fervent and amicable Expressionist energies. Gerd Koch’s “Two” portrays two yellow flowers, like bursts of visual intensity against an unfinished backdrop of drips and gestures on white. What is stated, and what is left unstated, contribute to the sum effect.

Ernesto Seco’s “Allegro Molto” is another of his works celebrating the kinetic power of an orchestra in action--as seen in his show in Ojai during the Ojai Festival. The subject here is human, visual and something more invisible, analogous to the invisible fury of sound, all antic limbs and the flailing motion of the music itself. Seco seems to have an intuitive grasp of the secret life of music and musicians.

Local scenery comes into play, in sundry ways, from the Cubist-cum-fisheye-lens look of Michael Irrizary-Pagan’s “Fishbowl at E. Clara St.” to the slightly eerie quality of Drew Meyerson’s “Orange Grove, Santa Paula,” its blue shadows cast like ghostly visitors upon the dirt paths.

Compassionate portraitist Alice Matzkin’s “Aunt Kitty” depicts an old woman in a wheelchair, spotlighted against a stage-like darkness behind her. Viewed in profile and stoically seated, the subject triggers obvious echoes to Whistler’s mother--minus the stern persona.

Don Fay’s “After Hours,” with its woman scrubbing a museum floor long after the visitors have gone, has a cozy, bittersweet Rockwell-ish charm to it, and Jacquelyn Cavish’s “Winter Light #3” depicts plants as a myriad of little prismatic details, in a visually busy composition that gains energy through its gentle chaos.

Photography is well represented this year, in work that veers off the beaten path, from the tangled density of Michael Appuliese’s “Dendrils” to the hyper-close-up floral studies of Bette Butler’s “Strange Flower,” a color negative that suggests an alien blossom. Jurgen Kuschnik, always with a disarming image up his sleeve, shows “Calla,” its slender stalks casting weird shadows on a vivid yellow wall. The wall attracts our attention as much as the flower.

Landscape takes an even stranger turn in Reilly’s “Landscape as Icon.” It’s one of the oddball charmers of the show, neither fish nor fowl, but something else again. Exactly what it is, in fact, remains unclear. Hence, it’s charm.

The painting itself, a bland, simple image of a tied-up boat and an unremarkable body of water, is affixed to a bizarrely elaborate, painted three-tiered frame. It’s hard to see the painting for the frame, which, no doubt, is the operative conundrum for the artist. And it poses a question to the viewer, with no pat answer, but an entertaining, conceptual buzz nonetheless. In cases like this, the ponder factor can be its own reward.

DETAILS

A Classic Competition art show, through Sept. 5 at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 South C St., in Oxnard. Gallery hours: Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sun., 1-5 p.m. 385-8157.