Focus on the Masters Finally Has a Place It Can Call Home

For several years now, Focus on the Masters has put energy and resources into the care and feeding of Ventura County’s artistic community.

Photographer Donna Granata, who started the project to create portraits of artists in the area, launched a series of artist lectures at the Laurel Theater and otherwise built a framework for focusing on the region’s art scene. Documenting and archiving the cultural legacy of a community is the goal.

As of this month, Focus on the Masters has an actual address that serves as a public exhibition showcase and headquarters on East Main Street in Ventura. On a recent afternoon, the place was buzzing with activity as volunteers helped bolster databases.

Granata took a visitor on a tour of the facility, which includes a library, a vault for archives, offices, and a space to be used for classes this fall. After running the expanding artistic resource project from her house for eight years, Granata seems thrilled to have an office-gallery to support the effort.

The center of attention, though, is an inaugural exhibition of art scattered throughout, seizing available wall space. Granata’s crystalline color portraits of artists are placed with the artist’s own work, drawing a short, straight line between art and artist.

The art-artist dynamic is often strongest in the case of sculptors and their works, as with a recent photograph of Joanne Duby, seen through the apertures in one of her sinuously folding stone sculptures. Famed ceramist Otto Heino’s portrait hangs in front of a table full of his wares, and a photo of mythically minded metal sculptor Ted Gall, taken in 2000, is flanked by one of his rough, welded creations.

Of keen interest in this exhibition is the art of Carol Rosenak, a veteran of the local art community who died recently. Her delicate watercolors, such as “Hummingbird Series,” are included in this show, as is one of her last works, “Hummingbird, Heart and Two Chairs.” Poignancy underscores the rougher imagery and blocks of colors in this piece, created through sheer will after a series of strokes had left her nearly blind.

Some of the better-known of Granata’s subjects have passed on, including photojournalist Horace Bristol (whose work raises a classic question: At what point does photography shift from reportage to art?). Next to Granata’s 1996 portrait of Bristol, who lived in Ojai for many years before his death, are two images from his Depression-era documentary work, rugged images of Ma and Tom Joad that went on to inspire John Steinbeck’s--and Hollywood’s--”The Grapes of Wrath.”

This place for Focus on the Masters to call home is the latest development in the ongoing project, and a new location to keep in mind when looking for art.

* Focus on the Masters, 1147 E. Main St., Ventura. Hours: Mondays-Wednesdays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays by appointment. (805) 653-2501. www.focus onthemasters.com.

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Acoustic Blues: Three years back, Santa Barbara-based country blues duo Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan celebrated a milestone, having rounded the 20-year mark as a team. They staged a special anniversary concert at Victoria Hall in Santa Barbara and recorded that performance for a CD which came out last year, the latest in a string of tasty recordings on various specialty labels over the years.

An appearance in the penultimate concert of Olivas Adobe’s “Music Under the Stars” series Saturday bills them as “good-time blues ambassadors,” and that’s about right. Theirs is blues to cure what ails.

* Tom Ball and Kenny Sultan, Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Olivas Adobe, 4200 Olivas Park Drive, Ventura. $15 general, $13 senior citizens and children 12 and younger. (805) 658-4726.