Rustic rides with David Hockney

You don’t have to know much about David Hockney or watercolor painting to see that the artist’s 55 new works at L.A. Louver Gallery are amazing documents of rambling drives through the English countryside. Each casually exquisite picture of leafless trees, golden fields, puddled lanes, blossoming flowers, distant farmhouses, rolling hillsides and quiet towns is an astutely observed moment that would never make it to a postcard but is all the more lovely for being ordinary.

In these enlivening images glimpsed through car windows, Hockney doesn’t take your breath away so much as he gets you to breathe deeply, soaking in every detail of the fleeting scenes, which are expansive. To stand in the center of any of the three galleries in which the show has been handsomely and matter-of-factly installed is to feel as if there’s a lot more space around you than usual.

Part of that is because of the landscape Hockney has chosen to depict. Its patchwork fields and rolling hills allow him to pack loads of details below the horizon, including tiny villages tucked into shallow valleys, low hedgerows shadowing meandering lanes and haphazardly arranged hay rolls, which further break up the space.

Plenty of room remains for the sky. Filled with an equally rich range of colors, textures and brushstrokes, it captures different types of light and the swiftly changing weather. In Hockney’s East Yorkshire, it may be rainy but it’s never bleak. The cold light is crisp, the gray clouds warm and the sunshine even sweeter than it is in Southern California.

The expansiveness of Hockney’s watercolors is also because of the way he has painted them. Up close, the spaciousness that is palpable from a distance all but disappears. What had appeared to be fully realized, accurately shaded, three-dimensional forms turn out to be flat puddles of color, schematic shapes and quick flicks or dabs of the brush.

It’s no accident that these unremarkable, anonymous marks coalesce, in a viewer’s eyes, at a distance. They fascinate because they reveal that Hockney is able to instantly translate the close-up view into the distant one -- that he knows, by patient observation, how subtle shifts in color mix in the eye, creating crisply convincing illusions of the landscape.

In a sense, he is in two places simultaneously: within arm’s reach of the watercolor’s surface, paying attention to the vicissitudes of his pedestrian materials, and across the room, taking in an overall view.

Walking up and back from each work, viewers experience something similar: jaunts through time and space that invite us to get outside of ourselves, into a world at once mundane and extraordinary, one accessible and right outside the car window.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through April 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

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Another day in the menagerie

Charlotta Westergren’s life-size portraits of exotic goats take gallery-goers to the viewing pens of county fairs by a deliciously circuitous path. On the way, we revisit Kurt Kauper’s portraits of imaginary opera divas and Matthew Barney’s lavishly costumed goat-man as well as Stephen Prina’s color-of-money monochromes and John McCracken’s otherworldly plinths. It’s a topsy-turvy trip that makes your head spin -- until you realize that weirdness is no longer restricted to society’s fringes but goes all the way through to form its heart and soul.

At Mary Goldman Gallery, “Princely Portraits in the Caprine Court and a Band of Merry Men” features three 7-foot-long paintings on aluminum panels. Each depicts a solitary goat, rendered in thick strokes of oil paint against a spray-painted plane of metallic auto enamel in purple, copper or sapphire.

“Rake” shows an extinct four-horned beauty bred for racing by the Vikings. Westergren’s sympathetic beast peers at viewers with journeyman earnestness and a strange mix of amiable curiosity and don’t-mess-with-me street smarts. Its just-washed curls glow with the light of a golden sunset, and its physical features share characteristics with an ark-like menagerie of animals, including rabbits, camels, cows, sheep, mountain goats, llamas, mules and unicorns.

“Libertine” presents a blue-ribbon Guernsey goat, its elegantly curved horns swooping back with the grace and power of a Ferrari. Strolling leftward, the regal creature glances over its shoulder at a string of pearls in the lower right corner, which appears to be too trifling to be bothered with. The same goes for viewers.

Amid such serious attitude, “Knave” is the ditz. Its eyes nearly hidden by long, frizzy stands of tangled blond hair, the angora goat looks overdressed and clueless. Its unevenly spiraling horns recall mismatched socks. Its upper and lower lips, pursed in a quizzical twist, suggest that confusion is its normal state of being and nothing to be ashamed of.

In a two-minute video, a vocalist and a guitar player seem to be channeling Thomas Wolfe, Tamara Fites, Paul McCarthy and Beck in a performance that is by turns pretentious, preposterous and touching. Westergren’s work-in-progress lacks the resolve -- and refined perversity -- of her paintings.

Like Cindy Sherman’s photographs of herself masquerading as hundreds of people, Westergren’s pictures of odd breeds employ artifice as a means to get to the passions pulsing beneath the surface of things.

In her anthropomorphic art, eccentricity is essential to any story worth telling, and exquisitely cultivated tastes travel freely between barnyards and galleries.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through April 2. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.marygoldmancom

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Eek! Are they watching us?

It’s one thing to feel that you’re being watched by other people. It’s quite another to believe that inanimate objects are watching your every move. From here, the slippery slope descends precipitously to a shadowy world in which rationality accounts for just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s the reality Chris Vasell paints in his L.A. solo debut at Blum & Poe Gallery. “Don’t go outside they are waiting for you” gently blends the movie industry’s interest in supernatural dramas with stain painting’s willingness to let thinned pigment do its own thing as it runs, puddles and dries on large canvases. The results are haunting landscapes that seem to stare right through you.

A love of Mark Rothko’s luminous rectangles and chilling voids lies behind Vasell’s art. The six big paintings in the main gallery acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the present by evoking aboriginal sand paintings, the domes of planetariums, fabulous ice caves, electronically transmitted lunar imagery and schematic renditions of ape’s faces.

None resembles another. In “Cephalic isolation” and “SELF (landscape)” disembodied eyes stand out clearly. In “Second day,” a single eye slowly emerges from an aqueous wash of dirty blues and murky greens. In others, it’s unclear if the eyes are hidden in the imagery or projected there by your overstimulated imagination. “Ariel Pink (S.O.E.)” is tie-dyed trippiness filtered through the paranoia of Thomas Pynchon’s Nixon-era hippies.

Vasell is adept at confusing inner and outer worlds. In a second gallery, 14 page-size watercolors include ghostly figures whose shadows may be their doubles, their evil twins or simply their reflections in mirror-like surfaces. Masks, monkeys and men emerge from foggy washes aswirl with mixed messages. Some figures resemble Jesus. Or Jerry Garcia. Or just a guy with long hair.

In every case, Vasell’s paintings contain a lot more than meets the eye. Their afterlives, in the mind’s eye, are even richer.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through April 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com

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Storybook tales from the dark side

The dark side of life takes shape in Eve Wood’s exhibition at Western Project. “Even the Pretty Trees Have Guns” combines 12 figurative paintings and 14 mostly abstract sculptures. Neither body of work is adequately resolved or fully developed, but there’s enough cockeyed idiosyncrasy to suggest that an original vision is brewing.

Wood’s canvases resemble children’s storybook illustrations. Imagine an emotionally scarred descendant of the Brothers Grimm whose goal is to share her pain with other sensitive souls.

In four works, a single horse dies in the grass, is choked with a lasso, stares stoically from a burning forest or, like a malformed unicorn, has a giant human hand growing from its head. In two other images, a dead bunny is fed to a lion and devoured by a falcon perched atop a man who covers his eyes in despair.

Using the style of storybook illustrations to show that life is uglier than it’s often made out to be doesn’t take viewers far beyond the obvious. This faux-naive style is overused by artists whose good intentions are greater than their technical skills and powers of invention.

In contrast, three pictures of stumpy trees with vine-wrapped limbs holding handguns poignantly embody the quiet desperation that suffuses Wood’s show. “Point and Shoot,” “Hopeless Magnolia” and “Something Happened on the Way to the Dream Factory” leave cliched stories of victims and victimizers behind to tell heart-wrenching tales of assisted suicides.

Wood’s sculptures are either too literal or too abstract. The ones that combine rocks with taxidermy deer legs, a stuffed quail, plastic vertebrae and steel handcuffs require too little imaginative investment.

The others, which consist of rocks through which Wood has drilled small holes, wrapped threads and stuck sewing needles, reveal too little. But both suggest an outlook in touch with the trauma of our times.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through March 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western-project.com