Natural Splendor

The grand old tradition of plein-air painting presupposes at least a couple of conditions. For one, it demands that artists get out, take leave of their studios. It also demands that painters pay close attention to what they are seeing, perhaps literally getting feet wet in the soil of their subjects.

It helps, of course, when a painter lives close to a worthy landscape. To that end, one of the rewarding peripheral charms of the current show “Plein Aire Painters” at the Ojai Art Center is the confirmation it offers us about the luster and great outdoors of this region.

The exhibition supports a cause for pride in the Ventura County area based on the notion that, while it has little of the cosmopolitan energy or cultural riches of Los Angeles, it has something perhaps equally valuable and irreplaceable--natural splendor and open spaces.

This much we are reminded of by the first painting, situated in the art center’s hallways. Sally Miller’s “Wheeler Canyon Country” depicts a lazy, dreamy country road scene, and the point is not lost that this scene exists just up the road from the gallery.

There are exotic corners and natural phenomenon in our midst that are well-served by the romanticizing attention of these painters. We admire Elizabeth Miller’s “Carpinteria Marshes” for its appreciation of the marsh’s strange meld of land and swamp, only later realizing that this scene is visible to Ventura Freeway commuters who care to notice.

Some amount of socio-ecological messages is encoded into the work here, usually in a subtle way. The art delivers a message of preserving and acknowledging the natural beauty around us, before the developers’ machinery of destruction inevitably takes its toll.

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The message rises to the surface in Suzanne Lamb’s rambling ode to what appears to be a flower-speckled field, but whose title is more sobering: “Landfill in Bloom.”

Ford Kaiser’s pleasant “Summerland” similarly extends a flattering vision of a town that would be idyllic were it not for the ever-present intrusion of the freeway, severing its connection to the beach.

Then there is Ojai’s own splendid Libbey Park, just across the creek from the art center. In Carol Merrick’s work, the park is envisioned with swooping, arcing lines, in a lyrical vision. Vegetation is not the only point of focus in the show. “Lee’s Place,” by Chris Weber, views a house with a gently abstracted style and a retina-warming palette, while Marsha Braun’s “Soccer Field--Thacher” portrays its subject, without players, as an alfresco still-life.

One of the strongest pieces here is Karen K. Lewis’ larg oil painting “Bluffs.”

It’s an odd composition--at least by comparison to the fairly conservative compositional values elsewhere in the show--in which a gathering of trees in an Ojai orange grove appears as a rhythmic visual clump.

These shadow-casting green orbs play off the curvy contours of the hills above, making for an image that represents its subject, but with an artist’s own assertive voice evident in the expression.

Lewis’ painting reminds us of another byproduct of the plein-air philosophy, having to do with the importance of personal style in balance with faithful reportage. In other words, you can take the painter out of the studio, but you can’t take the studio out of the artist.

DETAILS

“Plein Aire Painters,” through July at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tue.-Sun.; 646-0117.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]