Wild Art

Art is where you find it, or where you decide to take note of it. All around the county, there are modest art shows presented not in official art spaces but in restaurants and other publicly trafficked establishments. In effect, this world of art hides in plain sight.

Take, for instance, a smattering of paintings lining the walls of American Commercial Bank in Oxnard. “The Great Outdoors,” a juried show hosted by the Oxnard Art Assn., is a kindly, idyllic collection of pieces around the general theme of landscapes and backyard scapes.

Nothing here would disrupt the business at hand, but there are savory pleasures to be found upon close examination.

Wafting nostalgia passes through Debbie de Foi’s “Old Friends,” depicting a lazy afternoon view of a decaying old brick wall, faded printing advertising “tobacco.” “Remembering Rosie,” by Louisa Wallace Jacobs, has its own pathway to wistfulness. A hazy, unfinished quality guides its portrait of a horse and rider, as if through the elusive nature of memory, more shape and feeling than details.

From the realm of inspiration found in one’s own backyard we find Chris Weber’s “Lyons Garden” and June Mowles’ “Peaceful Glade,” its charm based on the simple convergence of overgrown vegetation and a fence.

Donna J. Clark’s “Kern Plateau” is a diptych in which the sense of landscape is suggested through truncated horizontal views of boulders and tree trunks. Skye Lord’s “Boulder, UT” is a watercolor, a simple, dreamy vision of a Utah valley, far from the madding, urban crowd. Dark, puffy clouds overhead look less threatening than nourishing.

Closer to home, while also leaning toward abstraction, Mel Rhoads paints the orange-to-blue streaks of sky at dawn in “Winter Daybreak-Camarillo.” The skyline of the actual locale is less relevant than the cosmic phenomenon overhead.

Rhoads also sneaks in an art-about-art reference in the otherwise conventional seaside painting, “The Outdoor Painter,” with a tiny artist perched over the beachfront view.

Outdoor paintings and outdoor painters offer respective variations on the theme here, in what adds up to a pleasing little garden of artworks.

Customers passing through the space may or may not take notice, but the art is there in the public sphere, for the partaking.

DETAILS

“The Great Outdoors,” hosted by the Oxnard Art Assn., through May 5 at American Commercial Bank, 155 South A St., Oxnard. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Friday, 9-6 p.m. 487-6581.

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Spring art notes: Several shows worth going out of one’s way to catch have sprung up around the county this month and will be covered in this space in coming weeks. Among them, speaking of art beyond gallery walls, is a show at Zoey’s on Main Street in Ventura by the engaging Mexican-born, Ojai-based artist Seco called “The Muse and the Musician.” Respected painter Gerd Koch, who co-founded the SCI Art Center on the future campus of Cal State University Channel Islands, is having his first one-person show in that finely outfitted gallery.

Artists connected with the fringe artspace known as the V2000 Gallery are showing their stuff at Art City II, and three veteran painters from the Ojai art scene--Bert Collins, Gayel Childress and Marta Nelson--are settled into the Ojai Center for the Arts for “Retrospective, 1950-2000.”