Unevenly Ambitious

For sheer volume of work, the art exhibition threaded throughout the Blanchard Library in Santa Paula warrants a prize of its own. Visitors are greeted by several panels throughout the library, with artworks in various media.

Welcome to the venerable grass-roots cultural phenomenon known as the Fine Art & Photography Exhibit, sponsored by the Santa Paula Society of the Arts and currently having its 62nd annual showing. This year’s jurors were gallery owners Robin Bagier and Joanna Steele, and they’ve followed a liberal, more-is-better mandate, allowing a broad range of work into the show.

In the oil painting section, especially, the quality wavers widely, but there are plenty of works rewarding the patient, inquisitive eye.

Take, for instance, Suzanne Schecter’s “Winter Sunshine,” with a brittle pictorialism that suits the quality of the title. This is one of Schecter’s series of works based on anonymous snapshots (which, ironically, are showing just a few blocks away on Main Street in Santa Paula’s Snapshot Museum), piquing our natural curiosity about the human story behind them, but also living on their own visual merits.

For local color, Lynda Gruber’s cheeky “Santa Paula Gothic” updates and strips away the dour stoicism of Grant Wood’s classic portrait of rural Americana. Here, a pleasant yuppie couple appear to be modeling neo-Puritan wear for a catalog.

For surreal and comic relief, we have Kristopher Doe’s “ ‘Gators in Cars With Guitars & Cigars,” a goofball dream scene that depicts exactly what the title describes. Sylvia Ramirez’s “Mae Lae Luk” is a stylized, Japanese-inspired depiction of a mother and child, and Julie Dahl-Nicolle’s Self-Portrait is refreshingly frank and observant on more than a surface level.

Family lineage continues with the print works of Kitty Botke, daughter of the noted late Santa Paula artists Cornelis and Jessie Botke, who were involved with the first show here. The younger Botke’s “Silhouette” and “Raptor” have an easy, fluid grace.

Other eye-catching pieces in the Graphics and Mixed Media category include Robert Herrera’s “1939 Grandma Cactus,” with its cactus elements locking into compositional place, and Frank Hine’s “Cinema Mexicana II,” blending Hollywood and Mexican movie promo designs, with Zorro in the metaphorical middle. G. Snyder’s “Marie” is a striking image in which broken eggshells and an ironing table in a dark room convey toil and compromised promises.

In watercolors, the entries are similarly diverse, from the intriguingly unfinished business of Terry Spehar-Fahey’s brushwork in “Reluctant Angel” to the more realistic bent on a cryptic theme in David James Smith’s “Closing In,” its stubbly workman subject weathering a storm in a giant machine.

Crisply noted realism is the goal in Alexander J. Guthrie’s “No One Is Missing,” savoring the play of light on the metal face of a locomotive, while the going gets abstract in John Koman’s “Conversation With the Family.” Here, spare interplay of colorful shapes suggests a lighthearted visual conversation.

Among the notable photography entries, Hope Frazier shows her sensitive black-and-white portrait “Woman in Prayer.” Charles Richards’ “The Competitor” portrays a marathon race as a sweaty blur of muscularity in motion, and, with the images of “Pipes,” Thomas Clayton assumes a strange angle and thus finds new expressive life in mundane objects.

Perhaps the strongest photographic entry is one of the subtlest, tucked away in a corner. Kasey Lennon’s “At Rest” is a diptych, artfully capturing the innocence of children without any of the usual campy cuteness or patronizing seen in many kid pix. Little, well-considered works like this tend to jump out of the pack in such a huge, meandering show.

The exhibit, in short, is a pleasant crazy-quilt of stuff, all about the artistic energy carrying on in our midst.

DETAILS

Santa Paula Society of the Arts 62nd Annual Fine Art & Photography Exhibit at the Blanchard Library, 119 N. 8th St. in Santa Paula. Hours: 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Mon.-Thurs.; 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sat.; 525-3615.