Focusing on Friendship

The protege/mentor tradition in art is deeply entrenched, despite the basic truth that making fine art is a fairly solitary business. But interaction is especially relevant within fine art photography, a medium in which artists can easily create portraits of each other, engage in shop talk about art and chemicals and exert influences.

Robert Werling, now based in Santa Barbara, is technically adroit, visually sensitive and humbly indebted to such celebrated veterans as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Brett Weston, with whom he has studied. Looking at the kindly sprawl of images in “A Way of Seeing,” his current retrospective exhibit at the Carnegie Art Museum, we see Werling as a skilled artist in his own right who has extended the traditions of his teachers-turned-friends.

And some of the striking images are of those teachers in their seasoned wisdom. We find Adams, a friendly, furry guru, looking warm and wise, while the sunglasses-donning Weston, cradling a cocktail in Carmel, cuts more the hip, crusty rebel image.

“Ruth Bernhard at 90” focuses on the aged photographer’s sharp, compassionate eyes, while the failing eyes of photography pioneer Cunningham, reading in bed by squinting at a book through a magnifying glass, suggest a deeper definition of seeing.

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Werling’s portraits of people in far-flung locales extend a quality of warmth and curiosity, but some of his best stuff is unpopulated. Much of the time in photography, the muse speaks through the details, and Werling captures a powerful sense of place or a persona by zeroing in rather than going for the long view.

Hamburg, Germany, is evoked through glimpses of old architecture and an arching sunlit railing that seems to heave its way across the composition. Venice, Italy, is viewed from overhead, via abstract reflections on the water and a teasing fragment of a gondola. Werling follows the Weston lead in finding visual sensuality in pictures of sand dunes, simultaneously real and abstract material found in nature.

Various slices of natural life, from places as remote as Africa, Europe and Santa Barbara, usually rely on a subtle, discerning eye in capturing the quite potent drama of nature up close. He stays away from the easy grandeur of the panorama, recognizing that details speak for themselves.

As a whole, the show--part of a recently published book--succeeds in presenting one attentive photographer’s admiring eye on the world we know, and know of. It’s Werling’s world, humbly perceived and inflected with his own artful eye.

Happily Mixed-Up: Surrealists tend to be impish puzzle-makers who try not to take reality or cultural standards for granted. They mess with basic assumptions about life, abuse the language of images and words and dabble in freewheeling mix-and-matching, all in search of a reshuffled awareness of the world.

That’s clearly the creed worth pursuing for the Calabasas-based Doug Webb, whose works at the Carnegie exude a kind of cheery irreverence. Child’s play? Or investigations into the unconscious? Perhaps both, making this a show suitable for the proverbial entire family.

He explores playful what-if scenarios in his imagery, as in “Inflation,” in which a big red, airborne balloon appears to be nudging the leaning tower of Pisa. Other ancient wonders of the world are gleefully revisited in such works as “Cradle of Western Civilization,” with giant play toys adorning the Parthenon, or “Lost in the Shuffle,” with giant playing cards scattered around the Arc de Triomphe.

Often, Webb’s fastidiously rendered exacting art, made from iris prints and acrylic on canvas, is shamelessly pun-driven, to the point where eye-rolling is the appropriate response. Puns, of the visual and linguistic sort, take over at times. “Caesar’s Salad” finds the Coliseum holding a behemoth portion of said salad.

On more solid aesthetic ground, the inherent influence of Rene Magritte’s dreamy paintings reaches its apex in works like “Train of Thought,” also a pun-oriented image of a man’s head invaded by a passing train, but in a vignette that tickles the imagination.

Better yet, “Nightfall” is a delightful trompe l’oeil piece in which a lakeside cityscape painting turns bizarre with a sky fashioned from a jigsaw design. One piece from the jigsaw sky has fallen into the water, a case of the surreal piercing through the barrier into the real.

Webb’s work veers from the psychologically provocative to the realm of cheap tricks and nudge-nudge humor, but what the heck? It’s all good summertime museum fodder.

East Meeting West: In the gallery devoted to local artists, Nancy Rupp has her day in the sun this month, with a show of works that makes an easy East-meets-West synthesis. Rupp’s skilled approach with Chinese brush painting, of calligraphic gestures on rice paper, combines with seeping color backgrounds in watercolor. A certain contemplative poise hovers over this work, a meditative objective revealed in such titles as “To Be, Able” and “Tranquillity.”

DETAILS

“Robert Werling: A Way of Seeing,” “Beyond the Boundaries, Surrealist Paintings by Doug Webb” and “Away with Words, new Calligraphic Works by Nancy Rupp,” through Aug. 1 at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday; admission $3 adults, $2 seniors and students, $1 children ages 6-16; 385-8157.