Colorful portraits at cafe are wistful dining companions.

There’s a new face beaming down from the walls of the Eclectic Cafe in North Hollywood. More to the point, there is a new series of faces via the peculiar portraits of Pamela Winterbottom.

Her recent paintings amount to a parade of faces--stylized, close-up and strange of palette--that stare over diners and loungers in the cafe.

Still, this art, as well as the photography of Mark Indig also showing here, is as much a background presence or as in-your-face as you want it to be--the ideal arrangement for art in a restaurant venue. Ignore it, ponder it, discuss it or buy it. Such is the lot of art hung in an eatery.

Art has been a part of the Eclectic Cafe’s agenda before, but this is the first change of artists in about two years. Winterbottom creates wistful and often whimsical mugs in point-blank close-ups, misshapen and flecked with unnatural color schemes. Often, she aims at depicting broad archetypes rather than specific individuals, as in “Common Man” and the swarthy “Dark Man.”

In the triptych “Redman, Yellowman, Blueman,” a sense of delicate balance mediates the three faces, and the middle panel sports the axiom, “When health is absent art cannot become manifest. Strength cannot be exerted. Wealth is useless and reason is power.”

“Primary Man” appears upside-down, the psychologically disorienting trick made famous by the German painter Georg Baselitz, but here the effect is more festive. Whatever the serious or philosophical aspects encoded into Winterbottom’s faces, ultimately her art is more warming than challenging.

Also showing in the Cafe, Indig’s photographs come from an entirely different place, that of a pattern-seeking, camera-wielding traveler. His best images combine an almost abstractionist’s eye for composition with elements of reportage. His range runs from patterns of logs stacked in a lumberyard in Humboldt County to a taxi station in Venice, Italy, dramatic in the waning light of dusk.

In an image taken in Nova Scotia, the subject is a simple, jagged row of bright red cabins, but the subtext is about seeing and framing everyday beauty.

BE THERE

Pamela Winterbottom and Mark Indig, Eclectic Cafe Gallery, 5156 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Hours: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-midnight. (818) 760-2233.