Colorful Continuum

Saticoy-based artist Susan Petty is no stranger to these parts, as both observer and exhibitor. Her work shows up, piecemeal, in various group exhibitions in the county, impressing with its sense of color and balance.

Seeing a generous, smartly presented retrospective of her work at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art is something else again. The exhibition, “Continuum: The Art of Susan Petty,” reveals a gifted artist on an unpretentious mission of investing sincerity and a few personal ideas into the still-life and landscape traditions.

Petty has no problem working up pleasant, conventional still-life and floral studies, but the more intriguing work in this show veers from the norm. She sometimes goes for hyper-density, with busy backdrops and rococo Persian rugs behind floral settings, to the point where background and foreground blur. Fittingly, two display cases in the gallery feature the artist’s materials and a swath of Persian rug.

In works with telling titles as “Art Imitating . . . “ and “The Eyes Have It,” Petty shows a self-consciousness about the process behind her product. In one smaller piece, “Red Over Red,” two red roses in a reflective silver pitcher are pitted against a furling red-and-white fabric with a print of leaves. The effect is a tad surreal, as if the imagery on the fabric completes the concrete, three-dimensional subject.

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Venturing outside her studio, Petty found an embarrassment of riches to paint. Her watercolor landscape paintings, often with specific trees as protagonists, are admirable in their restraint and focus, the opposite effect of her denser floral paintings.

She pays affectionate tribute to scenes familiar to anyone who notices the secret landscape life of Ventura County, especially on the stretch through and around Saticoy. Close to home, she depicts “Saticoy Palms,” a clump of palm trees looming over an empty street, in a visually rhythmic relationship with the telephone poles across the way.

“At the End of Aggen Road” is a loosely rendered scene with eucalyptus trees amid orchards and a tiny yellow road sign pointing nowhere. Her tendencies are further emphasized in “Sespe Sycamore,” which treats its subject as a portraitist would a model. Petty sees the trees rather than the forest, perhaps an extension of the selective eye involved in painting still-lifes.

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At least in terms of scale, the centerpiece of the show is “Adagio,” painted on six panels and consuming most of the back wall of the gallery. A contemplative view at twilight, much of the composition focuses on the varicolored palette of sky and clouds, eliciting an ethereal drama. On the bottom fringe, like an afterthought, is a silhouetted outline of life on the ground--trees, telephone poles and scattered hints of buildings.

Petty’s priorities regarding the relationship of nature are clear, articulated in her compositional forms. In “Adagio,” as in “Fenced Out,” with a tiny hem of fence at the bottom of a tree-dominated painting, man-made elements are relegated to the margins.

It doesn’t work that way in reality, of course. But Petty sees something else, and her work inspires both as art and as a forum for appreciating the natural elements still alive and well in the county she was born into.

DETAILS

“Continuum: The Art of Susan Petty,” through Feb. 25 at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St., Ventura, 653-0323. Tue.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com