Fine art, to be seen every day

Stephen Brown’s small paintings of friends, family and favorite places are the visual equivalent of comfort food. They make for satisfying, everyday fare -- hearty, balanced, fresh. An accomplished Realist based in Colorado, Brown paints confidently within established boundaries. He is like the chef who continually mines classic recipes, respecting their traditional ingredients but ever refining, refining.

Brown’s portraits of his son, Rushton, are among the most memorable in his current show of recent work at Forum Gallery. Within the parameters of conventional portraiture, Brown conveys the nuances of the boy’s evolution into a young man, picturing him at one moment hasty and out of breath, at another patient and maturely grounded, and at yet another resigned, perhaps a bit bored with the filial requirement of posing.

In “My Son,” he stands with head slightly cocked, hands in pockets. His ripe lips are closed, but his eyes converse intently with those of his father behind the brush.

Other conversations ensue chromatically and texturally. Rushton’s periwinkle shirt, soft and flowing, contrasts with the sober geometry of the forest green door behind him. The door’s brass handle acts as a vivid exclamation point in the panel’s lower right corner, while counterbalancing a patch of golden ceiling visible in the upper left.

Each of Brown’s paintings can be thus dissected to reveal thoughtful architectonic structures and solid harmonies. The landscapes are especially placid, with low horizons and big benign skies.

Dissonance is rare. Several of the portrait subjects have intensity in their eyes or brows, but Brown keeps his images tame. The riskiest he gets is portraying his father on his deathbed, ensnared in tubing, and a woman friend, nude from the waist up, after her mastectomy.

The integrity of Brown’s paintings comes from the insistent freshness of his observations. He might use and reuse standard formats, but he’s not a lazy painter. One close look at the whispers of gray, green, pink and blue in the flesh tones convinces that he’s enamored of the process of rendering presence. Brown invites us to savor it too.

His images of fruits and vegetables against bands of color are nicely executed but can get a bit sleepy. The more personality his subjects have, the better a vehicle they are for Brown -- and Brown is for them. A still-life of an old salt shaker made of thick glass, its sides undulating like an accordion, is as straightforward, structurally, as the rest, but feels packed with nostalgia, its narrative poised to unfurl.

The portrait of “Lois” is similarly dense with the complexity of aging. The taut determination in her eyes competes with the growing looseness of her skin. Her hair reads like drifting snow.

Brown’s work is slow and steady, turtle to the contemporary art world’s quick-fix, novelty-driven hares. Its authenticity and lack of pretense bring great satisfaction.

Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-1550, through Saturday.

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Freshness where freshness is due

To say that drawing is in vogue at the moment is to issue a statement as basic in a commercial sense as a morning stock report, and yet to utter something historically ludicrous. Imagining drawing ever falling out of favor is like predicting a day when song or breath becomes obsolete.

A group show of recent drawings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art affirms the medium’s primal appeal. Not all that hangs here is brilliant, but a certain freshness prevails, an immediacy inherent to the medium itself.

Enjeong Noh’s two self-portraits are prime examples, gems of direct observation. In their intricacy and delicacy, Laura Lasworth’s pencil drawings of lace circles are parallel acts of humble handwork. Their distilled beauty conjures the patterning of snowflakes and flowers as well as the sacredness of cathedral rose windows.

Mercedes Helnwein’s two drawings, one in pen, the better one in pencil, each show a pair of young women in darkness, as if in hiding. The raking light of promise or release sculpts their features.

The freshest surprise of the show -- which also includes work by Hilary Brace, Steve Galloway, Colin Gray, Robin Palanker, Raymond Saunders, Patty Wickman and Peter Zokosky -- is a wonderfully eccentric piece by Adonna Khare.

To render her large carbon pencil drawing, Khare has channeled Hieronymus Bosch, Alexis Rockman and her neighbor in the show, Zokosky. Nothing is where it ordinarily belongs in this swamp-scene of hybrid creatures practicing dentistry, jumping through hoops and dangling on swings. It’s a peaceable kingdom overall, friendly as an illustration of a children’s tale, but quirky and campy enough to whet the appetite for more from Khare, a graduate student at Cal State Long Beach.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Aug. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Trying to be in the thick of things

Penelope Gottlieb’s sleek new paintings at Michael Kohn Gallery have an airbrushed perfection about them. It’s a familiar look, as common to the silver screen as the advertising page. Wherever packaging supersedes content, we’re sure to find surfaces like these -- surfaces that allure and dazzle.

Gottlieb uses metal-flake automotive paint on aluminum panels to get the glassy slick, shimmery effect -- the attenuated legacy, perhaps, of cool, “L.A. Look” sculpture of the late 1960s. These works, too, have a hot-rod snazziness, but the fantasies they embody seem generated more by Hollywood and consumerism in general.

Most of the paintings are single portraits, glamorized and generalized in tones of charcoal gray. The men and women look vaguely familiar. Generic movie stars in tight close-up, their faces are radically cropped, their features airbrush softened. They appear both posed and poised, attentive to the gaze of others.

While Gottlieb titles this body of work “Reading Faces,” it could just as easily be dubbed “Reading Formulas.” These are ideals, not individuals. Ornamental covers, not compelling tales.

Gottlieb has worked as a commercial artist for television and film and recently received her master’s degree from UC Santa Barbara. In her statement for the show, she likens the layers of paint to layers of skin and claims that the paintings “seduce by decoding the machine of faciality.” Layers of paint make these paintings slick, but layers of rhetoric can’t save them from being thin.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through Aug. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Some of this deviance is good

“In Door Out,” a fairly tight little group show at ACME, joins four artists whose work forges connections between inside and outside space. L.A.-based architectural photographer Benny Chan is the straight man in this crowd. His clean color prints show domestic spaces of remarkable grace. Walls of glass in these spare, elegant rooms dissolve the boundary between outdoors and in, creating beautiful environments of meditative purity.

The other three artists play with deviance, in one way or another, and with variable success.

The suburban homes in Daniel Dove’s paintings look like they’ve been distorted by poor reception. The forms stutter, skid and repeat. There are some nice passages where abstract patterning plays against straightforward figuration, but otherwise the Cleveland-based artist’s work feels like an idea that might already be exhausted.

Jennifer Steinkamp applies sophisticated computer animation skills to the most basic of subjects in her two projections for the show. In one, a stalk of lilies twirls and shimmies behind the gallery’s front desk. In the other, the branches of a purposefully generic tree repeatedly bow down, then straighten back up. Leaves shift from vibrant spring green to pink then crimson. For a time, the branches are bare, like pale antlers. The scene mesmerizes in much the same way animation made for more overtly commercial and entertainment purposes does -- by infusing the proudly artificial with a soul, a link to the organic.

Brooklyn-based Dawn Clements provides the show its most raw talent and most exciting, manic energy. Her drawings in sumi ink or ballpoint pen are sprawling panoramas, dense stream-of-consciousness chronicles of interior spaces.

In the 13-foot-long “View From Bed,” the arc of Clements’ vision splays like a pelt across the gallery wall. She draws, with care but no fuss, all that her eyes take in as they pan across her room: the television, a dress form, a shelf of books (the titles full of directional clues to motivation and influence), crooked pictures on the wall, knickknacks, the ceiling, the floor, the view out the window and down the street.

Clements has a voracious appetite for what she sees -- and also what she hears. Her drawings are flecked with handwritten snippets of dialogue, advertising slogans, famous names. Like pages from an articulate visual diary, her work records internal and external worlds simultaneously, seamlessly.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Saturday.