OUT & ABOUT / Ventura County : sights : Different Strokes : Artist’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ captures impressionistic view of California.

California is the place, painting with a heavy hand and romantic eye the game, for Constance Faye Haverlah, whose work is showcased at the Buenaventura Gallery in Ventura this month. Haverlah calls her show “California Kaleidoscope” for obvious reasons, as she ventures from Leo Cabrillo beach in Malibu to Morro Bay and other Californian corners.

One sign of success, by landscape painter standards: These paintings inspire a yearning to go there. There is something of the impressionist in her, in the way she fuses colors and avoids the temptation to obsess over details at the expense of feeling.

But she also likes to lay it on thick, to romp visually, in the foliage and savor the postcard-worthy views.

A kind of layered wistfulness emerges in such pieces as “Eucalyptus, Old Charmlee Ranch” and “Misty Shoreline, Goleta Beach.” In these, the specifics of place are less important than the metaphor supplied by nature and captured by an attentive artist.

Among other work, displayed in the outer room of the gallery, standout pieces include Mickey Short’s assured, appealing way with watercolor, in works depicting a male form and a museum, in that order.

Charlotte Olonoff evokes wandering thought with her twilight cloudscape painting, and Kathy McGuire, who normally produces compact watercolors of local street scenes, goes big on canvas with the celebration of a view on Poli Street.

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DETAILS

“California Kaleidoscope” by Constance Faye Haverlah, through Saturday at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., in Ventura. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m., 648-1235.

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The Art of Flaunting It:

Lavish is the operative word with the main exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, now spread out like a gaudy banquet over the museum’s two main galleries.

To mangle a couple of cliches: All that glitters is thicker than water in the “Cecil Family Collects: Four Centuries of Decorative Arts From Burghley House,” a showing of treasures collected by a British family.

It’s distinctly possible to have more multiple, equal and possibly opposite reactions to the exhibition, which includes furniture, objets d’art, functional items, paintings and sculptures. On one hand, the elegance overflows, the antiquities impress and the aura of cherished refinement won’t quit.

But the Yankee in us, bred to be skeptical of aristocratic manners and elitist acquisition, may find this display of wealth, dating back centuries, a touch creepy. Prosperous flaunters, particularly from the mother country, run counter to our rebel stripe.

That said, forget the facts behind this collection: that it has been maintained and nurtured by a family dating back to the 16th century, a family that sequesters itself from the world in a fortress-like estate. Photographs of the exterior and interior rooms give us an idea of its grandeur.

Forget the self-aggrandizement of the flattering portraits and the audacity of the collection and enjoy the splendor of it.

You get a sense of life in Burghley House, beginning at the entrance, where an ebony cabinet attributed to Leonardo van der Vinne in 1680 dazzles with its exacting use of mother-of-pearl marquetry, marble and bronze, with a gilt wood stand.

Another, more modestly crafted collector’s cabinet seconds the notion that acquisition is in the blood.

Propped against one wall of the McCormick Gallery, a sprawling 17th-century tapestry entitled “The Grape Harvest” is a dreamlike scene depicting naked pudgy boys romping through gnarly twists of vines and branches, before a palatial backdrop.

Miniaturist precision is staggering in some of the smaller pieces, arrayed in display cases. A snuff box, circa 1720s, includes a tiny painting on canvas.

“Bust of a Moor” is a small piece from 1600, of enamel, gold and agate, and the glittery “Book Cover and Book,” a tome for a Lilliputian, is made from gold and white enamel, set off by rubies and diamonds.

Other collectibles appear in groupings, from porcelain figurines from Germany and sets of china to silver wine cisterns that one has to strain to imagine as a functional vessel.

One of the more offbeat, and therefore memorable, pieces is the 17th-century Japanese porcelain sculpture entitled “Group of Wrestlers.”

The figures, capturing the most active and muscular piece in the show, are embroiled in polite bodily conflict, a choreographed entanglement of forms.

This show won’t win friends and influence visitors who hold to the view of an art museum as a vibrant, contemporary organism. Instead, it clings to the old-fashioned notion of museum-as-mausoleum and climate-controlled showroom for the elite. There’s a time and place for that approach, and this is that time and place.

As long as it doesn’t become a habit, who’s to complain? Call it an embarrassment of riches.

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DETAILS

“Cecil Family Collects: Four Centuries of Decorative Arts from Burghley House,” through Oct. 10 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; 963-4364.