Fall Brings a Diversity of Arts: It’s Live, It’s New, It’s Local : Art: Area galleries plan a variety of themed group exhibitions and solo shows and try to overcome Westside competition.

If art activity in the San Fernando Valley hasn’t exactly kept pace with the continuing Westside explosion, local galleries at least have maintained a steady presence with widespread exhibitions displaying a diversity of interests and medias. And this fall is no different with a collection of themed group art exhibitions and solo shows in area galleries.

But spreading fine art through the Valley has remained a struggle in several ways, with gallery closings outpacing openings even on busy Ventura Boulevard.

“When I first started talking about operating a gallery in the Valley, a lot of people said it was a cultural wasteland,” said Scott Canty, art curator for the municipal satellite galleries, which includes the Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills. “And I told them to picture me as water to the wasteland, so that the culture can grow. But I’m finding that it takes more than two years. It takes a longer time to develop a relationship with the arts.

“I think it’s a prejudice,” Canty added. “Santa Monica and the West L.A. area is a very enriched area with a lot of people in higher-income brackets. If I was a gallery, why should I open up a gallery in Encino or Woodland Hills, when there is already a base in the Westside?”

Nonetheless, the Artspace continues with its 2-year-old tradition of presenting emerging artists with “Elements.” The show, which opened last week, includes work by Los Angeles-area painters Marilyn Duzy, Pamela Holmes and Jean Togood, colored pencil drawings by Dara Mark, photographic works by Sant Subagh K. Khalsa and rock and wood sculpture by Karlin Wong.

All the works in the show incorporate images of nature. Duzy’s large canvases depict nature’s scope and power with raging fires, a storm-swept ocean and grain-covered fields, while Khalsa’s photographic works offer desolate areas invaded by technology.

“It’s nice to be in a show where the work really isn’t competing on any sort of philosophical basis,” said Mark, whose own drawings of California’s subtle seasonal changes were made over the course of a year by returning to the same outdoor vantage point. “It feels that everybody is in agreement that it’s important to look at the environment, to relate to it.”

After “Elements” closes Oct. 6, Artspace will present a group exhibit of spiritual work called “Of the Spirit,” from Oct. 22 to Dec. 1. Described by Canty as “art that transcends into the realm of angels and truth,” the exhibition will include painters Dan Callis and Michael Schrauzer, sculptor Roger Feldman and muralist Kent Twitchell.

Artspace is located at 21800 Oxnard St., in Woodland Hills. It is open noon to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. For more information, call (818) 716-2786.

Diverse perspectives on photographic portraiture are presented in “The Real and Unreal” at Burbank’s Photo Art Gallery through Oct. 31. The exhibition, spotlighting the work of artists Ken Miller, Gordon Mark and the solo-named A. Frasheski and Jeff, offer wildly divergent directions of photography.

“When I was curating, I was looking at the literalist and expressionist in portraiture,” said gallery director Eileen Webb. “Some of it is very abstract.”

She compared the work of Miller, and its stark documentation of the deterioration of San Francisco’s underclass, with the photographs of Diane Arbus. By contrast, Jeff, whose work is displayed at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is often clouded under layers of hand-coloring.

“It’s almost difficult to recognize its original photographic content,” she said. “There are little elements that come through. But it is so vigorously colored that there is a tension between the two.”

The Photo Art Gallery, located at 150 S. San Fernando Road, is open 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays, and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays. For additional information, call (818) 846-0673.

Another themed exhibit is on view through Nov. 18 at the Finegood Art Gallery, at the Bernard Milken Jewish Community campus in West Hills. Titled “Spirituality: Visions + Viewpoints,” the collection of paintings interpret spirituality in connection with the current Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

The final collection of paintings by Yona Brand, Rachelle Mark and Adrianne Prober were chosen along the same standards as other, non-religious exhibitions at the gallery, said Marlene Streit, co-chairwoman of the event, and who is also guiding a group show of 25, mostly local artists, at the Toluca Lake gallery.

“The intent was to bring out this time of spirituality, reflection and meditation. Each of the artists has their own vision of what spirituality is,” she said.

The Finegood Art Gallery, located at the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus, 22622 Vanowen St., is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, call (818) 716-1100.

At the Installations One Gallery in Encino, a 10-year retrospective of original works by Los Angeles Times editorial illustrator Richard Milholland will be the subject of his first local solo exhibition since 1983.

“The art world considers this simply illustration,” said Steven Lee Stinnett, the show’s director-curator. “But they are really reacting to the idea. They haven’t seen the work.”

Stinnett said that out of a collection of 300 illustrations, he expected to be showing at least 60 on the gallery’s walls until the show’s conclusion Oct. 13.

The work is a lyrical, sometimes blunt collection of images of faces and hands, critical portraits of such world figures as Idi Amin, that Stinnett compared to the work of the noted Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte.

“He has always had a sort of surrealistic bent to his work. It’s an unusual blend of traditional rendering and surrealism. The work tends to be a little on the dark side.”

“The Color and Pattern Show,” a group exhibition of abstract art by 12 local painters, follows the Milholland show at the gallery Oct. 18, continuing through Nov. 10. Gallery hours at the Installations One Gallery, located at 15821 Ventura Blvd., in the Encino Terrace Center, are currently 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, call (818) 789-9706.

Further east along the boulevard, the Tower Gallery will spotlight artist Samantha October, who specializes in idealized oil portraits of pop music figures. For a few days beginning Oct. 25, the mixture of 25 black and white and colorful images will replace the variety of limited-edition prints that hang above sculptures in the gallery’s front space.

While the Sherman Oaks gallery devotes most of its space to prints by such nationally distributed artists as Erte and Michael Parkes, Tower has often presented work with a pop music slant. Graphic prints and paintings by crooner Tony Bennett and rockers John Lennon and Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood have been the subject of earlier events at the gallery, which is an offshoot of the large Tower Records chain.

“It’s a type of link to people’s earlier years, when they were young adults,” said gallery director Barry Smith. “Now these individuals are 30, 35 or 40 years old, and professionals. And this is something they can identify with.”

On Nov. 15, the Tower Gallery will host a reception and book signing for veteran animator Chuck Jones, while offering original and limited-edition cels from his work with Warner Bros. and elsewhere.

Smith added that he is also attempting to steer the gallery’s direction more toward original, local art. Among the earliest beneficiaries is Irish-born artist Amanda Watt, whose bright, energetic still-lifes spill excitedly off the canvas and onto their surrounding frames.

But in the three years of the Tower Gallery’s existence, Smith said, he’s watched local galleries struggle to find an audience and survive. In the last year, he said, two Ventura Boulevard galleries, L.A. Art and Gallery Nicole, went out of business.

“It’s kind of a shame,” Smith said. “I would welcome other galleries in the vicinity. It would be good for the Valley.”

The Tower Gallery, at 14523 Ventura Blvd., is open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays, and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. For more information, call (818) 995-4278.