Community Art Project’s (CAP) Banking on Art gallery is so called because it’s located—where else?—inside the Wells Fargo building on Ocean Street. Under the rotunda, ordinary bank business transpires on street level; above, you’ll find the art hanging on the curving walls surrounding the wide-open middle. If you step back to get a little distance from the works by Karen Wiechert and Jacqueline Nicolini in “Painterly Wizards,” there’s some fear the floor will disappear. Of course there’s a railing to prevent a plummet. But as you look more closely into Nicolini’s series of bird paintings, the disorientation might just creep back in.
Her birds make the trek to Laguna totally worth it. They are executed in intricate detail, while the content within their formal compositions plays with your perceptions. Everything seems in order at first look, but then scale flies out the window—only that window is painted.
Fascination with these birds that inhabit rooms too small for them—or are they human-sized birds in miniature rooms?—intensifies as you try to figure out what’s just happened. Who or what broke the vase in The Curious Case of the Broken Vase? Did it fly in through the door ajar to a room where the size of things makes more sense?
In Looking Back, the viewer seems implicated in the tussle that led to the loss of three huge feathers now strewn on the rug. Or was the tiny bird in the hanging birdcage the culprit? Go, bird, and fly off into that Renaissance light. Learned Bird nests on stacked books atop a cigar box, with the pull-string from a marble bag curving around its body; meanwhile, below, the marbles spill out. Who has lost their marbles?
“Miniature scale models, dollhouses, dioramas, vintage objects and toys are the props I use to set the stage of my narrative paintings,” says the Rembrandt-loving artist. In one of the non-bird works on view, The Lunch Break, a rural landscape is seen from a bird’s eye view: a big farmhouse, a barn, trees, toy cars and toy people, who stay upright thanks to flat platforms for feet. There’s a pool with a footprint about the same size as the house’s, but in it is a shark that’s so big you wonder if it can even turn around. The shark is eyeing a faux girl who is holding one of the toy chickens scattered about. Will she feed the chicken to the shark? Very much like a dream that takes place at Sea World but is also at home, or in this case, good ole great-granddad’s farm. These are just toys, right? The rolling hills where this scene transpires are golden, and it all adds up to something that looks as it should, until it very much doesn’t.
Waitin’ At the Crossroads is an oil on panel that exudes diorama, with its toy train and a painted backdrop of purple mountains, clouds and blue sky that’s taped to cheapo-looking paneling—the three pieces of tape look as if they were slapped on in a hurry, yet this is all achieved with Nicolini’s exquisitely precise brushwork. The leaning telephone poles and the curving roads that meet here, just where the train passes by, stir up loneliness, making the wait uncomfortable.
The artist says her narratives are projections of her own story, “expressions of my own anxieties, fears and the discoveries put on canvas.” The scenes are full of charm and tension, allowing the viewer plenty of leeway to imbue the paintings with personal stories of their own, whether you think they are real birds inside dollhouses or lifelike toy birds inside elaborate birdhouses.
Wiechert’s paintings are skillful, with luscious 1950s party dresses against whimsical backgrounds that suggest wallpaper, but are definitely not wallpaper. She situates some of her cow subjects against similar flower patterns, but others gaze directly at the viewer with a sky beyond. Getting to know the bovines by name on a friend’s farm in England, the Laguna College of Art + Design graduate instills the creatures with a lot more intelligence than any cow I’ve ever locked eyes with. People bought up the small cow paintings, including Ruthie, Rita, Joy and Lizzy. More popular with me are her dogs, especially the one at the beach: ball! wet! run! Wiechert attended art school in her 50s, and though her work doesn’t contain the complexity of Nicolini’s birds, her love of subject and medium come through.
While there is magic in the bird paintings, the exhibit itself has no real organizing principle, adding up to two retrospectives by dedicated artists adept with their tools. That in itself fulfills the mission of CAP’s Banking on Art space, which is to exhibit quality artists with a substantial body of work who may not yet have representation. That said, I imagine the real wizarding begins after the bank, built in 1961 and hopefully never to be rehabbed, is closed. That’s when all the cows and frocks, and birds and toy figures come to life and haunt the bejesus out of the place.
“Painterly Wizards” at CAP Gallery, 2nd floor, Wells Fargo Bldg., 260 Ocean Ave., Laguna Beach. Through June 3.
Lisa Black proofreads the dead-tree edition of the Weekly, and writes culture stories for her column Paint It Black.