Compassionate Conservationist

It’s difficult to focus on strictly aesthetic matters when considering work of a certain strain of local artists, those concerned with the region’s slowly disappearing natural splendors. Like Susan Petty’s recent show at the Ventura Museum of History and Art, some landscape-oriented artists create art with a subtle activist subplot.

The idea is that, by highlighting the dignity and beauty of last holdouts of nature, art can help the cause of preservation and stave off the ecological hammer blows of development. Idealism is not dead.

Such a situation defines the exhibition of work by Karen Riffel now at the Buenaventura Gallery. Riffel presents a stimulating series of variations on a very specific theme--the local Ventura landmark known as “Two Trees.”

Visible from much of west Ventura, the trees are perched on what is, for now at least, a bare hilltop. To some, they have come to symbolize endangered natural purity in a region highly coveted by developers.

Riffel, who has lived within view of the trees since 1954, offers multiple perspectives on the subject, and in different media.

The sum effect is a show about art and awareness of one’s immediate environment. “Process is everything,” she has said, and the process here is all about seeing and envisioning.

If the artist’s affection for these trees weren’t evident enough in the imagery, the case is stated clearly in “Ventura’s Royalty,” in which the trees are seen as a brown silhouette against gold.

“Skyline” is a computer-generated image, a horizontal view with the trees centered in the frame. Patches of color seep together fluidly in the watercolor “Los Arboles con la Vista.”

A rare hint of external forces emerges in the watercolor-and-ink “No Trespassing,” with its forbidding sign and wire fence alluding to man’s intrusions and co-opting of landscape.

The artist, or at least part of her, eases into the frame in “Emily and Me,” a self-portrait of the artist’s shoes, her sleeping cat and the trees in the distance.

While usually taking a distant perspective in these pieces, Riffel occasionally gets closer and more personal with the subjects, as in “One of Two.”

This acrylic “portrait” depicts one of the trees in heroic light, with a squat, stolid trunk and draping leafage.

The largest painting here is “Reaching for the Sky,” a close-up view in which the spidery limbs extend into various directions.

What is in a tree or two? Plenty, Riffel’s series implies.

And she has the artistic insight and curiosity to elicit our conservationist compassion, in addition to admiration for her easygoing artistry.

Also in this show, titled “Two Trees and Ten Rocks,” are sculptures by Virginia Buckle.

An innate idea behind the show’s title is that Buckle actually ushers hunks of nature into the gallery space, but the conceptual strength of Riffel’s body of work here tends to overshadow the sculpture.

Not that Buckle’s work isn’t notable: Her alabaster pieces are smooth, sinuous forms suggesting figures, plant life and abstract variations thereof.

In short, nature--of the local sort--has a field day in the gallery.

DETAILS

“Two Trees and Ten Rocks,” work by painter Karen Riffel and sculptor Virginia Buckle, through Feb. 10 at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. Gallery hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Tues-Sat.; 648-1235.

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