Sabina Ott’s Gutsy Paintings Convey Struggles and Adversity

Your eyes don’t glide across the colorful surfaces of Sabina Ott’s new paintings so much as they get stuck--like a truck in the mud--in the clunky passages of congealed wax the artist has dumped, spilled and splashed over large wood panels. Sometimes cutting through its thick, semi-translucent layers to the gritty grain of the wood below, and at other times wadding leftover scraps into crude sculptural reliefs, Ott builds meaty pictures whose garish colors ensure that they’re not for the fainthearted.

Hardly seductive and anything but delicate, these gutsy paintings at Mark Moore Gallery neither retreat to the background like bashful, well-mannered wallflowers nor stand out for being conventionally pretty. They appeal to something deeper than superficial attractiveness.

Although Ott’s obstinate images of lumpy flowers, fragmented words and colliding stripes are a hairbreadth away from being ugly, they embody a sense of willful determination familiar to anyone who has ever struggled for something that did not come easy. Facility and effortlessness are nowhere to be found among the brash abstract patterns that fight for your attention in these feisty works. Rough around the edges--and all the way through--they highlight the fact that talent is not all that it takes to get the job done.

At the heart of Ott’s earnest work is the conviction that sticking to a task by rising above daily frustrations is its own reward. A working-class romanticism and an honest, plow-through-the-hardships integrity take shape in her art, which shares as much with the manual activities of artisanship as it does with the cerebral theories of decoration it also embodies.

Ott’s unsubtle paintings leave no room for bitterness or resentment. Holding pride of place for hard-won satisfactions, the elements that make up her piecemeal compositions galumph across their surfaces with infectious verve. Finesse is fine, they seem to say, but when push comes to shove, muscling your way through adversity can’t be beaten--especially when it leads to the winner’s circle, which, like Ott’s art, is adorned with bouquets and filled with sweetness.

* Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Jan. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Dry-Dock Dreams: If boats could dream, the images they’d see in their sleep might look like Richard Sedivy’s new paintings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art: finely crafted abstractions, into the recessed centers of which have been set modestly scaled diptychs. Most of these internal works pair a precise yet ghostly painting on panel (on the left) with a low-relief diorama (on the right), all of which include various combinations of handmade toy boats, driftwood and simple boating equipment.

Sometimes, as in “The Myth of Freedom (with rudder intact)” and “The Poor Self,” Sedivy juxtaposes a two- and three-dimensional rendition of the same vessel. In these pieces, the sculptural component has the presence of an aquarium from which the water has been drained, giving its lone vessel the poignant presence of a fish out of water. The painted images initially appear to be complete and naturalistic, but, as in dreams, significant elements are missing or barely sketched in.

Sedivy’s illusions float on hints and suggestions. Never spelling out full stories or articulating singular narratives, they eschew the flashy theatrics of heart-stopping nightmares for the trance-like serenity of dreams that seem to go in slow motion.

The structure of his paintings illustrates how the big picture sometimes emerges from the focused contemplation of details. Each of his eight fairly large works is horizontal, with its top half painted one color (usually a rich, creamy white) and its bottom another (usually a rusty orange but sometimes a deep gold or a grayish yellow).

At first, you see these components as abstract landscapes, or more properly as seascapes. Only upon visually unpacking the inset sections do you realize that their exteriors (or frames) do not present sweeping views of the sea and sky but instead stand in as close-ups of the sides of dry-docked boats, painted one color above the waterline and another below. The interior life of boats thus takes shape in Sedivy’s art, spilling out of its boundaries to imaginatively transport viewers to a faraway place.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Celestial Glow: At Newspace Gallery, a fine selection of paintings by Frederick Wight (1902-1986) pay homage to Arthur Dove and Mark Rothko, while presenting a moving meditation on the passage of time. Although Wight was a traditionalist in terms of subject and style, he was not afraid to exploit aspects of other media in his abstract landscapes.

His 17 mid-size oils on canvas focus on the moon or the sun as it rises or sets over the ocean. Painted sparingly and swiftly, these dry yet luminous pictures consist of thin washes of paint (resembling watercolors) over which dry-brushed shadows have been added.

Wight applied paint parsimoniously. Rather than seeming stingy, however, his exacting applications capture ambient light with remarkable efficiency, duplicating its look as it flickers through the atmosphere, sparkles off calm waters and shimmers off breaking waves. Likewise, his moons appear to be cool crescents, warm glowing orbs or disks of white so bright they make you squint.

The blindingly bright ones suggest that Wight did not paint on an easel under the stars but in a studio, from photographs taken with long exposures. Many of his works include passages that recall stop-action, time-lapse photography, with paired moons connected by slightly dimmer streaks of light. Others resemble halo-shrouded comets streaking through space or beaded strings of jewels hung high in the sky.

Wherever they were painted, all of Wight’s landscapes are suffused with a sensuous silvery glow. With one foot firmly planted in the world of scientific objectivity and the other in that of soul-stirring poetry, they bring a bit of the moon’s beauty down to earth.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Saturday.

Parts and Flowers: Based on childhood memories of his grandparents, Jeff Gambill’s new, 4-foot-square paintings fall into two groups: a series uniformly titled “Blacksmith” and another titled “Bird of Paradise.”

Painted on canvas, his wispy renditions of his recollections of his grandfather’s blacksmith shop are thin, gassy atmospheres occasionally punctuated by an ethereal biomorphic figure or a crisply rendered, if ultimately indecipherable, detail. The dense, smoke-choked mystery of the workshop, where hot coals smolder and hammers crash against anvils, takes on a strange sense of serenity in Gambill’s soft, oddly delicate paintings.

In contrast, his homages to his grandmother are filled with bright colors, sharply pointed forms and messy brush strokes, laid out in aggressively abbreviated compositions. Painted on both sides of clear plexiglass sheets, Gambill’s unresolved flower paintings contain promising passages but suggest that he is not sufficiently experienced with their materials to wrest what he can from them.

At this point it’s clear that Gambill draws a lot from his memories of his grandfather’s blacksmith shop, and is probably more comfortable painting in the style represented by his canvases. Still, a lot of untapped potential lies in his oils on plexiglass. It will be interesting to see whether the two sides of Gambill’s project will eventually add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Feb. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.