Works in Progress

One of the welcome traditions in Ojai’s cultural calendar is the Ojai Studio Artists tour, a chance for outsiders to come on inside and see the laboratories where the creative impulse is translated into physical artwork.

For last weekend’s 16th annual tour, art seekers braved sweltering heat to tool about town, turning into mild and benevolent traffic hazards as they consulted maps to artists’ homes.

The list of artists includes plenty of regulars from year to year, and it’s always nice to check on their progress, stopping in, for instance, at the Farnhams’ house in downtown Ojai. Ruth paints sweet abstractions and John creates metal sculptures of both tabletop and garden proportions, dotting the large backyard.

Very different metal sculptures are found in the orange grove-surrounded studio of Theodore T. Gall, whose work tends to rely on feats of welding and figures that might be heroes and villains from comic books or mythology, or both.

In Upper Ojai, just past where the late Beatrice Wood had her studio-showroom headquarters, another creative couple are at work. Richard and Alice Matzkin work in separate corners, stylistically and literally, in separate studios of their rustic property in the shadow of the Topatopa Mountains. He creates figurative sculptures, often of people outside the usual model-body type, while she paints affectionate, loose-brushed portraits of a cross-section of humanity, including Beatrice Wood.

Farther on up the road, the last stop of the tour every year is worth the trek: Nancy Whitman’s Upper Ojai home and studio are a little world unto themselves, complete with a pond and a separate studio with fireplace and a compelling sense of a country home retreat. Whitman is a prolific painter, and her pink-suffused Postimpressionist works, reminding us of Bonnard and Matisse, line the walls and other available spaces, their hues often resonating with the carpet and decor.

In a new addition to the tour, batik artist Bernadette DiPrietro--responsible for the artwork on the official brochure and map--showed her work, which often spins off Chumash pictographs and other native sources, up in the remote Ojai Valley School. It’s a fitting addition in the sense of giving a picture of what Ojai is about; among other things, it’s a haven for private schools.

Surprises sneak in the side door and set themselves up in the yard, as happened in one of the unofficial “stowaway” events in the so-called Art Detour. This is a fringe festival-like organism that has only recently cropped up, as a healthy guerrilla addendum to the official tour. Up past the popular stopping place of Otto Heino’s house and workshop, heading up to Thacher School, one could stop at the main Art Detour site--advertised with colorful, makeshift fliers all over town--where Carmen Abeleira-White and Ernest Seco showed their work in the tree-filled yard. The sound of Bach’s Cello Sonatas, played by Yo Yo Ma, filled the air, and shade was ample. In other words, it was a place to linger.

Abeleira-White’s assemblages are exuberant constructions on old wooden doors, liberally festooned with found objects, including vintage bottle caps and metal advertisements for products now part of folklore. Seco’s series of nude studies comes from a rough-hewn perspective, with a vivid, almost unfinished quality, that adds to their mystique.

Another Art Detour site, on the other side of town in a hilltop villa off Foothill Road, offered its own dramatic atmosphere, with a sweeping view of the valley. Sue Halstenberg’s traditional realist portraits of “Victorian Ladies and Angels”--her description--and David Borgen’s landscape and nude paintings were scattered through the house, the lavish quarters supplying its own show-stealing ambience.

Also “off the map” this year was OSA veteran Ronda LaRue, who set up a “Millennium Labyrinth and Art Installation” called “Dreaming the Unveiling.” LaRue can be relied on to up the ante of thinking about conceptual art in a scene that doesn’t necessarily abound with alternative ideas.

All roads led, aptly enough, to the Ojai Arts Center, where a reception and auction (benefiting a student scholarship fund) were held. The gallery is also host to an exhibit of work by the official tour artists this month. The show serves as a kind of ongoing residue of an event that lasts two days a year, but also confirms our sense that art is a living, thriving enterprise in this legendary little burg.

DETAILS

Ojai Studio Artists tour exhibition, at the Ojai Arts Center. Gallery hours: 10-4, Tue.-Sat.; 646-0117.

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