Not Quite Sculpture, Not Quite Painting

Southland artists Merion Estes, Joyce Lightbody and Keith Sklar are three worker bees, busily interpreting life’s relentless buzz. Their intricate, playful paintings and mixed-media works are on view through Feb. 25 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center in a spunky trio of solo shows called “Merion Estes, Paintings,” “Joyce Lightbody, Selected Works 1994-1999” and “Keith Sklar, Recent Work.”

Together their related visions--hotly colored, lavishly layered, humorous--cross the traditional lines between sculpture, painting, assemblage and collage.

Together their trenchant perceptions dissect the largely futile notions of control over reality and orderly existence that we might hold.

Together they are an upbeat and challenging adrenalin rush--definitely worth a stop at the gallery.

Sklar makes small caricatured sculptures of dogs, cats, pigs and humans from what is essentially stuffed paint. He slathers layers of paint on an object, separates the hardened slimy-looking cast or paint “peel” from the object beneath it and stuffs the peel with newspaper.

“Voila Chorus” is a goofy tripod of peel-wrapped human and animal figures, heads together, propping each other up and looking dazed, as if they were shrink-wrapped inside some sort of slime.

“Buddha Peel” is a nod to Sklar’s process. Here he has partially peeled paint off a small plaster figure of the pot-bellied enlightened one.

Like Sklar, Lightbody and Estes delight in subverting paint.

In this exhibit, Estes’ best paintings are abstractions, her restless, relentless, tumultuous patterns of circles, ovals and tendrils on fabric ground with an occasional paint drop or bit of lace on top. They are primarily two-dimensional but offer an illusion of depth.

Many of them look like what you see when lost in meditation--the light-flashes of an altered state.

Estes’ mixed-media panel “Sea Change” is her most fluid, a fantastic, underwater view of mass and motion.

Lightbody keeps a set of secrets. Her small collages of oil, ink and postage stamps on wood are detailed with tiny musical notes and snips of text--”rock steady,” “ddrone”--streaming across the surface like armies of ants.

They read like irreverent jazz scores, visual music for the march of life.

They are equally intricate on the sides against the wall, where the kinetic patterns continue. But don’t try to ogle their backsides. Just know the beat goes on.

Walking through the rambling Irvine Fine Arts Center you can’t help but wish these finely detailed pieces were hanging closer together so their intense energy could rebound and build.

Still Gallery One, which is devoted to Sklar’s sassy paint-as-sculpture, is pure fun. On first view it looks like a miniature Disney theme park, peopled by Sklar’s impudent, paint-peeled “Rats,” “Pig,” “Conquistador” and more.

SHOW TIMES

Three solo shows: “Merion Estes, Paintings”; “Joyce Lightbody, Selected Works 1994-1999”; “Keith Sklar, Recent Work,” Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free. Through Feb. 25. (949) 724-6880.