Local Beauty

Douglas Shively is a name familiar to anyone with a passing awareness of Ventura County art history. The painter-rancher-banker was a kindly mover and shaker in the Santa Paula art scene, helping to establish the annual art exhibit there about 60 years ago and lending his own impressive hand as a traditional landscape painter to the art of the county.

But, as curators John Nichols and Meg Phelps suggest in a statement for the Shively show now at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, the artist deserves to be considered in the broader context of influential California art, not just as a local legend.

Judging from the wares on view here, it’s a reasonable proposition.

Shively, who died in 1991 at 95, dutifully captured what he obviously viewed as indigenous beauty in the local environs and beyond.

Mostly ignoring the reinvention of painting that shook 20th century art, Shively painted what he saw and what he sought out.

He projected affection for the art--and the act--of painting, and did so clearly, without pretension. His subjects, beyond the usual vistas and grand floral displays, included humble structures, barns and trees, especially sycamores (he was dubbed “Mr. Sycamore”).

“Borega” is a small painting of a one-room shack flanked by a tree, a modest archetype of an oasis in an otherwise desolate desert setting. “The Pinkerton Home,” replete with free-range poultry in the driveway, is a model of rural repose and a sight one can still find in our county. “Park Near Los Osos II” is a peaceable little kingdom; and his simple, picturesque views of the Rincon depict a more untamed, untrammeled seaside corridor, too often taken for granted by numb commuters on the Ventura Freeway.

Trees, flecked in dramatic sunlight in “Fall Cedars Above Bishop,” glow with a luminous golden air. And his beloved sycamore trees are not just incidental scenic details but become the heroic protagonists of bold paintings such as “Sycamore, Oaks, Sumac” and “Sycamore, First Rain.”

Even after a stroke left the artist unable to paint with his former exactitude, his will to paint prevailed.

The resulting work is far rougher, as seen in the elemental horizontal swipes of brushwork in his 1989 work, “Sycamore Cluster, Steckel Park,” from one of his favorite painting haunts in the area.

In this painting, and even more so in the stroke-and-dab surface of “South Mountain Barn,” the imagery pushes more toward abstraction than his earlier, more realist work, however much the result of physical limitations rather than aesthetic choices.

These late pieces convey a different visual energy, but it’s an undeniable energy that is also an important part of the Shively story.

In the back hallway, the Shively show continues with peripheral but relevant material to the life of an artist who was dedicated to visualizing the world as he passed through it. We find sketches, paintings from European travels, photographs and references to his cursory life as an architect.

In the 1970s, he was asked to do a painting of the house he designed and built in 1928--and which he and his family lived in until the early ‘40s.

Rather than paint the Mediterranean-style structure with its amendments, he depicted it as it looked when first built.

Memory plays a key role in this exhibit, both the power of an artist’s mind’s eye and a kind of nostalgic temperament that these warmly considered views of the old California can instill.

Shively’s Ventura County, and his California, evoke an endangered state of being, but one accessible to those with a selective eye or a good memory.

To that end, he belongs in the ranks of important California artists of the 20th century. By definition, that ranking entails wistfulness over a changing terrain.

DETAILS

“Recollections: The Art of Douglas Shively,” through Feb. 20 at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura. Hours: Tue.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; 653-0323.

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