Urban Visionary

Polluted by graffiti, litter and smog, many of James Doolin’s landscapes lead viewers to believe that the artist equates Los Angeles with dystopia. Not so, he says.

“The main thing I’m looking for is interesting visual material,” Doolin said recently, “something that’s dynamic, maybe a contrast of tones or a configuration of forms that keeps the eye moving.”

A veteran, L.A.-based realist painter, Doolin has been depicting the city’s urbanscapes for most of the last two decades. That’s what made his work a natural choice for the inauguration of the main gallery at Cal State Fullerton’s new art complex in downtown Santa Ana, university officials said.

“James Doolin: Selected Works 1983-Present” opens Sunday at the new Grand Central Art Center. The 13-piece exhibit, containing several large-scale paintings, includes “East Wind” (1991), which is reproduced on the cover of writer Mike Davis’ best-seller “Ecology of Fear.”

The book, which discusses L.A.’s precarious ecological environment, leaves no question that Davis views the metropolis as an “apocalyptic theme park.” Certainly, Doolin said, an ominous tone shrouds his painting, a Santa Ana-wind swept freeway scene.

But he wasn’t concerned with issuing any social indictment on the vast stretch of yellowish-gray sky and endless, streaming freeway lanes he surveyed as he painted.

“I got into trying to make the composition work,” he said by phone from his L.A. home. “It occurred to me that it would make the painting more interesting if I put a palm tree, blowing in the wind, right in the middle. I added the big, wedge-shaped clouds, and then it seemed the sky should be yellow. One thing just led to another.”

Not all of Doolin’s works throughout his nearly 30-year career feature concrete and steel. The exhibit includes studies for four murals he painted for the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1996. One of those shows a blue-sky L.A. of 1870.

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Another painting on view, “4WD” (1983), places the viewer inside the cab of a four-wheel-drive truck, seemingly abandoned in the middle of the desert, with a handgun mysteriously left on the passenger seat.

Again, however, it’s not meant to spell out a specific narrative, but convey the general sense of natural violence Doolin felt while living in the Mojave Desert in the early ‘80s.

“Usually I care most about [conveying] a kind of awe at what I’m seeing,” he said. “There was this attitude of early Renaissance painters, who were concentrating on realistic paintings at a time when the world was coming away from looking inward and starting to look outward.

“It was an almost primitive, very touching attempt to capture all aspects of that real world out there,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, to look at things in a transcendent way and find what I feel, be it beautiful or scary.”