A Palette-Pleasing Blend

Wendy Maharry’s colorful, allusive artwork, now showing at Peirano’s, is the sort of work that could easily divert diners’ attention from their plates, as it offers up a conversation piece of no uncertain charisma.

One point of discussion might be which art reference points she brushes across in the line of aesthetic duty.

It’s tempting, and possible, to cite a laundry list of influences on her art, including Fernand Leger’s machine Cubist approach, the lighthearted fantastical bent of Chagall, the chunky figuration of Botero and a strong element of Mexican art’s imprint.

Playing the name game, always a temptation in any process of cultural appreciation, doesn’t amount to an accusation of derivativeness. Rather, it reflects on Maharry’s awareness and sense of rootedness in the continuum of 20th century art. To boot, and most important, her work is sensuous to look at.

Maharry, who is also a musician and who lives in Ventura County with her family, handles her pastels with assurance and grace, working in a mode she calls “magic realism” but that by any other name is just as sweet. She freely dips into cultural soil from different old worlds, here European, there pre-Columbian, extending the 20th-century instinct to mix the modern with the ancient.

So it’s not at all shocking to find, in the same show, Mayan design ideals in “Green Devoured” and “Blue Devoured” and the mother-and-child image tinged with a Madonna reference in “Statue Liberty.” “Vulnerable” finds a quasi-Cubist nude figure, cascading down half the composition in a mannered visual expression to the point where the figure becomes as much decorative as realistic.

The careful blend of energy and order in Maharry’s work may be best represented by the aptly titled “A Furious Peace,” with its image of parents and child attaining a mythic quality, their bulbous features and the composition’s conscientious symmetry adding up to a picture at once unreal in its stylization and sympathetic. The charm hangs in the balance.

DETAILS

Wendy Maharry, through Aug. 27 at Jonathan’s at Peirano’s, 204 E. Main St., Ventura; 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and 5:30-9 p.m.; 648-4853.

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Watercolor Partners: Over at the Buenaventura Gallery, the main gallery is host to two artists bringing distinctly different approaches to the watercolor medium.

Faith Fellman’s fastidious, angular pieces celebrate architecture, often of the funky and/or vintage variety. She takes, and gives, pleasure in her depictions of the warbling roofline of an old English teahouse in Carmel or the imported vernacular architecture of Chinatown in Los Angeles. Charming desolation greets us in the dilapidated edifice of “Deserted Store.”

Often, these structures fill the picture frame with their misshapen forms and exuberant color schemes. And Fellman has no compunction about assisting in the process, adding her own elements of visual exaggeration in a piece like “Home for Cats,” in which a rambling Victorian house is a backdrop for a coterie of feline inhabitants.

The artist’s cartoon-like distortions accentuate the unusual designs, recalling the buildings in Disneyland’s Toontown, in which architectural logic doesn’t quite add up, except by ‘Toon logic.

JoEllen Stevens heads off in another direction, tapping the watercolor medium for its impressionistic attributes. “San Antonio Creek” is a soft-edged patchwork of colors verging on abstraction. She dips further into abstraction in her “Free Pour” series, using paint in a literally flowing way, avoiding the brush.

Stevens also periodically reins herself in to create more traditional pieces, such as “Ojai Post Office,” a straightforward image of that landmark building. But then she is back out again for “Grape Universe,” with fruits dangling in a strange thicket of visual stimuli that’s not quite of this world. Or, more to the point, it’s in a world of its own.

DETAILS

Faith Fellman and JoEllen Stevens, through July 17 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Tue.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; 648-1235.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.