Spiritual Exploration

At the risk of generalizing, the 20th century has witnessed a growing separation of church and art.

In earlier periods of art history, church patronage and spiritual expressions of artists accounted for a tight, symbiotic relationship between the muse and the church, an important aspect of the evolution of Western art as we know it.

Early in the century, modernism arose with a faith in itself, ultimately presenting fine art almost as a secular surrogate for religious faith. At present, they seem like disparate worlds that intersect only in times of controversy, as with the current flap over a show of British art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In the show are images that violate standard Western ideas of how religious iconography should be presented--i.e., a Madonna image with elephant dung. But, just as with the earlier struggle between artist Juan Serrano and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the art at the center of controversy comes from a sincere attempt to consider one’s spirituality through a personal artistic filter.

It would be difficult to ignore this historical-cultural backdrop in viewing “Crosswise,” the current show by Lee Hodges at the Buenaventura Gallery. In it, Hodges, an unabashed Christian and an unabashed contemporary artist, tries to find a bridge between the two modes of faith.

It’s a bit startling, actually, to view her work in the normally secular space of a gallery. In dealing with her joint interests in spirituality and the art-making imperative, Hodges has settled on a logical strategy of collage-like imagery that combines pictorial material and relevant snippets of text, as from the Bible or a hymnal.

Some works exert more visual charm than others, including “The Sower” and “Jacob’s Dream,” in which the layering effect coheres into a poetic drama.

Her imagination runs, if not wild, then laterally, even in the ‘straightest” image in the gallery. In the painting “Jesus on the Shore,” Hodges depicts Christ standing by a shore, which turns out to be that of Cachuma Lake. In her own way, the artist is personalizing and localizing a deity. Unusual as it is in this context, Hodges’ work is hardly inflammatory, apart from possible discomfort some faithful might feel in viewing “Artists Under Grace,” her portrayal of artists who have professed, or worked for, religious concerns. The composite image prominently features Van Gogh, who was fueled by extreme Christian sentiments but who would hardly be considered a poster boy for the religious right.

That aside, Hodges’ art is the open-minded, sincere attempt of an artist to come to grips with her own spiritual beliefs in a medium open to interpretation.

DETAILS

“Crosswise,” mixed-media art by Lee Hodges, through Dec. 4 at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 648-1235.

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Fine Art Bloodline: It’s important to know, on one level, that Kitty Botke does, in fact, descend from sturdy Ventura County art stock.

The artist is the granddaughter of the locally famed Santa Paula-based artists Cornelis and Jessie Botke, whose noted mural work and paintings from early in the century made them pioneering art heroes in the region. But Botke the Younger is also her own person, who generates her own quiet sense of style in the medium of etching. A nice sampling of her work can be found in the Upstairs Gallery of Natalie’s Fine Threads. She has a fine, moody and sometimes quaint approach to art, mostly on the theme of animal life and the female nude form, sometimes in the same composition.

“Matisse” is a frankly posed reclining nude, a la the French master, while “Evolution” depicts a nude woman swimming underwater amid dolphins.

Farm animals have their day here, too, in charmingly miniature portraits of a cow (“Motherhood”), napping hogs (“Barnstyle”) and a horse (“Friend”). In “Simplicity,” Botke shows an impressionistic landscape image, a blue-tinted expanse with silhouetted trees on the horizon. Both the natural world and the au natural form come naturally to this ranching, art-making daughter.

Also showing in the gallery are sculptures, many also animal-themed, by Ann E. Latchford. She leans toward assiduously smooth surfaces and contours, sometimes in the direction of New Age-waxing art. But she also cuts loose with a disarming, atypical bit of eco-politics in “Fishing with NAFTA,” which portrays dolphins being haplessly funneled into a tuna can.

DETAILS

“Good Company,” prints by Kitty Botke and sculpture by Ann E. Latchford, through Nov. 28 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, 596 Main St., Ventura. Gallery hours: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 643-8854.