Sense of Escape

One thing to be said about the Studio Channel Islands Art Center (a.k.a. SCIART) is that the visitor really feels a sense of getting away from it all.

Tucked away in an ample corner of this remote property--the former Camarillo State Hospital, the future Cal State Channel Islands--the gallery benefits from its detachment. That sense of escape being a tacit goal of fine art itself, a poetic ambience hovers around the place.

And that sensation is further amplified when the art on display is as muscular and evocative as Gerd Koch’s current show of old and new paintings. Koch has long been a hero among painters committed to the power of painting. Based in Ventura County, Koch taught for many years at Ventura College. After retiring from the college last year, he co-founded this enterprising art venue and studio compound.

The current show, “Visions and Encounters,” is roughly divided into two bodies of work, hewing to different stylistic regions. His landscape pieces are tough and lovely, aptly described as coming from an “abstract impressionist” approach, related to a statement of his dating from 1959 in which he alluded to “the unspoken urgency of nature.”

In paintings such as “About a Summer Evening,” “Walking Into Spring” and “Into the Evening,” we get a complex series of impressions, with imagery at once representational of nature’s recognizable elements and fancily departing from them. These paintings, vis-a-vis the titles, suggest the fragile, deep beauty of nature and the temporary encounter we have with it, a flow of days and seasons out of which we eventually drift.

Sharply contrasting with this more lyrical vein of Koch’s painting are the majority of canvases hanging here, with figures depicted in a mythically and notably more Expressionistic idiom. Figures are roughly outlined and marked by slashing, stabbing brush strokes, then set against stormy backgrounds that sometimes seem Francis Bacon-ian in nature.

They are Bacon-ian in another sense, as well, in that Koch’s “Encounter” series involves pairs of figures whose lines of action are drawn ambiguously. Are these encounters based on conflict or sexuality? Are they fashioned more from myth, shamanistic symbolism or flesh? In the questions rests the art’s unsettling appeal.

“Meeting Oneself” may be interpreted as a half-ironic portrait of the artist as a rifle-bearing, gas-masked man facing a floating head. We know the feeling. Spiritual malaise enters the picture in this work too, as with “A Vision of Departing Souls,” with wriggling, ascending souls basking in red-yellow heat. In the large, over-heated triptych “Wonders of the Vision,” spectral, naked figures are similarly aloof on a hot landscape, a pyre burning in the distance.

At face value, it’s a show with at least two personalities given vent. But the two directions are, in fact, separate rivulets of the same coursing river: Koch’s aesthetic has always been that of a searcher, making instinctual stylistic turns in the pursuit of honest artistic expression.

DETAILS

Gerd Koch, “Visions and Encounters,” through April 29 at the SCIART Center, CSUCI campus, Camarillo. Gallery hours: Thurs.-Sat., noon-3 p.m.; 383-1368.

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Three and Fifty: The numbers and the concept may not line up neatly, but there is a certain delicious audacity to the show, called “The Retrospective 1950-2000,” now at the Ojai Center for the Arts. The notion of showing three artists with 50 years of art-making under their respective easels is somehow reassuring. Ditto, the art.

Each of the three artists heeds her own stylistic corner here. Marta Nelson shows images of dancers, landscapes and local sites like the Ojai post office (a painting cheekily called “93023”). Often, she softens the surface with diaphanous layers of paint or effects that suggest kaleidoscopic, soft-core Cubism.

Bert Collins, a familiar presence in Ojai for many years, has no time for such surface effects. Her landscapes are crisp and done with an exacting eye, often with pastel on fine sandpaper. Her paintings accent the idyllic in nature, rarely depicting anything overtly “dramatic,” thus allowing subtle drama to seep into the scenes on its own.

In this company, the rebel is Gayel Childress, also a stalwart figure in the Ojai art scene for many years. Childress’ own art has followed a restless, creative course, embracing different expressive personas and media. Her “Red Valley” series grabs the retina with its over-baked hues and local color filtered through a dream that entails Matisse and Cezanne.

Her nude paintings have evolved over the years, as we note, from a fairly straightforward study of an ample female nude from 1960, compared to the wilder visual schemes of her “blue nude” series. The show, in a nutshell: 150 accumulated years, three artists and a friendly, variegated garden of ideas and images.

DETAILS

“Retrospective 1950-2000,” through April 29 at the Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery St., in Ojai. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., noon-4 p.m.; 646-0117.