A Pause That Refreshes--And Confuses

Flirting, floating, flitting with the wind. Tom Field’s changeable vision seems both canny and capricious, in a catch-all posthumous show of paintings and watercolors at Santa Ana’s Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.

On view through June 30, “Tom Field, Pausing to See: Abstract Expressionist Paintings, Black Mountain College to the San Francisco Bay,” is a tribute to a man who hung with the luminaries of San Francisco’s Beat Generation--yet never gained fame himself.

Field (1930-1995) came of age in the ‘50s when Abstract Expressionism was in ascendance in New York and the Bay Area. He absorbed the gestures of Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. (De Kooning, like Field, attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina.) But, at least in this exhibition, Field seems not to have risen much above erratic and occasionally engaging emulation of their moves.

Curated by Denise Di Salvo, who once shared a communal house with Field in San Francisco, “Pausing to See” features 22 boldly stroked oils and 14 whimsical watercolors, arranged more or less chronologically.

The exhibition is a bit of a mind-teaser because it features a small selection of paintings in many styles spanning four big decades. And a number of these canvases are less than top-notch.

You get the feeling that way too much is missing--including a sense of Field’s shifting mind-set and intent.

Spread across the gallery’s walls, his oeuvre is a cacophony of impulses and influences.

A densely worked 1981 canvas titled “Red Queen I” implodes with menace. Thick with red-green-white paint, it recalls de Kooning’s kitschily horrific women and Franz Kline’s slashing spatial abstractions, smooshed together.

With its strong geometries and circles that resemble empty eye sockets and car tires, “Red Queen I” looks like an automobile gone mad, a memorable kind of hell on wheels.

It is the strongest work in the show.

Also eye-grabbing is “Irish Wars” (1981), a frosty white abstraction taut with ironic bite. A small stream of reddish-pink pigment shoots through the painting’s center like a bloody wound, overlaid with black lines resembling barbed wire. Below that Field painted in a small shamrock, symbol of Irish pride.

Several of Field’s more gestural abstractions seem leaden, as if the artist’s hand were sluggish from too much or too little attention.

Other canvases feature lighter, more lively lines that are almost calligraphic, squiggling like polliwogs, repeated like mantras.

“Gulf War” (1991) is a cartoonish commentary featuring sketchy hunks of battlefield detritus that seem to have evolved from those trancelike squiggles. Its sensibility seems akin to that of Robert Williams.

Earlier topical work “Kent State” (1970) offers harder, angrier lines. It feels more flat-out outraged and polemical.

“Field’s Pig I” (1977) is a de Kooningesque take on porcine pleasure--a perky little porker with feline curves and doglike eyes whose flank looks as raw as supermarket meat.

“Frank and Chevy” (circa 1978) is an impressionistic view of a man and his auto, all elegiac and breezy and California dreamin’.

Two paintings from the 1950s are heavier by far in hue, tone and technique. They throb with weighty tension.

Clearly a man of many moods and modes, Field. Yet there is a consistent note. Whatever the riff of the moment, he seems to have painted for the pure transcendent pleasure of it.

There’s an easy charm to Field’s watercolors hanging in the back gallery.

Made from 1985 to 1994, they catch the happy sheen of yellow light on the moody Pacific.

They smile.

* “Tom Field, Pausing to See: Abstract Expressionist Paintings, Black Mountain College to the San Francisco Bay.” (Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 117 N. Sycamore, Santa Ana, [714] 667-1517). Wednesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Through June 30. Free.