SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Art Walkers : The gallery path led from clean, climate-controlled quarters to the funky fringe.

The premise behind Friday night’s Gallery Walk in downtown Ventura was simple. By organizing gallery schedules, printing up handy maps and arranging an early evening art walk, the Department of Parks and Recreation has sponsored a movable art forum that, with any luck and public support, will become a tradition on more than just a once-a-year basis.

Along the way, art walkers could be found brushing elbows, taking in the sights and downing the usual refreshments. The path led-- topographically and aesthetically--from the clean, climate-controlled quarters of the Buenaventura Gallery to the funky fringe territory of Art City, and points in between.

What the Gallery Walk amounted to was a concentrated tour of a fairly rich, diverse gallery scene that has developed in the Old Town area. Rambling from gallery to gallery in the space of an evening reveals that the art downtown ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, the idyllic to the inflamed, the conventional to the alternative. And vive la difference.

The newest and most newsworthy show among the lot was the Buenaventura Gallery’s annual juried show, curated by Chris Lyons of Santa Barbara’s Arpel Gallery--an exhibitional smorgasbord in two and three dimensions.

Handing out a special award was Herb Gould, whose late wife, Katie, was involved in the Ventura Art Assn. and who has seen many changes over the years, including construction of the present building. “I don’t know many of you here,” he said. After handing out a check, he quipped: “If it bounces, just put it back in again.”

Much of the work here is friendly to the eye and the mind, along the lines of flora, animalia or gentle abstract strategies. Award winners included Duane Simshauser for his collage-generated abstract image “One of the Wild Places,” and Michelle Chapin for her stone sculpture “Transformation of the Spirit,” a study in contrast between rough edges and a polished oval.

In art, of course, subjective evaluation rules. Here are a few of my favorite things in the show:

Sculptor Hanna Lore Hombordy has a fun field day with materials and forms. “Engineer’s Dream” combines rusty gears with genteel decor touches, while “Phun House” is an Alice in Wonderland-cum-cubist house assemblage.

Charlie Reynolds’ “Change of the Season in the Lemon Orchard” at least breaks with tradition, physically. An orchard scene is depicted on four irregular rectangle panels, assembled somewhat haphazardly and bowing out from the wall slightly. It’s a valiant attempt to transcend painting’s two-dimensional orthodoxy.

Tucked away in a hallway by the bathroom is one of the most oddly alluring images in the show. Linda Jay-Wartenbee’s “Long Road Home” is a curious painting of a rural road from a sheep’s eye view. A herd, viewed from behind, funnels itself into the proverbial infinity. The existential metaphor of the scene can be taken or left.

If memorableness is any measure, this painting gets my personal best-of-show award.

Down the road at Sacred Visions Gallery, the fare leans more toward Southwestern ideals--of both the cowboy and Indian varieties. Frolicsome cowgirls in varying states of headdress and undress abound. Roland Roy’s work here, unlike his fanciful “Water Lilies and Koi” at the Buenaventura Gallery, casts an admiring eye on the female form.

The newest space on the downtown scene, Pacific Rim Gallery--reviewed in these pages recently--features a range of artists, from the provocative imagery of Soviet-on-loan Slava Shukorukov to actor Charles Napier’s drippy watercolor landscapes.

Up the hill at the courthouse, the scene was as pretty as a landscape painting. Geary Thompson meted out classical guitar strains while the sun set on Old Town off the courthouse balustrade.

In the atrium hangs a huge mural made by 14- to 16-year-old girls from Ventura School, a California Youth Authority facility. Artists-in-residence Michelle Chapin and M. B. Hanrahan guided the students in the project, involving silhouettes enhanced by pastel flourishes and graffiti-like scrawls, with such truisms as “love is pain.”

Back down the hill in the civilian area, the Palm Street Gallery was buzzing with onlookers and arts folk. Prominent on the back wall is the triptych “Wild Gift” from Rob Beckett’s “Party Painting Series.” Beckett is wont to envision trash and trivia as if it washed up on the shore of American pop/junk culture. Candy wrappers, tools and other bric-a-brac are all thrown into a giddy, dizzy disarray.

By stark contrast, Claire McAuliffe’s large abstractions-- referring obliquely to the real-world sights of “Yellow Sky” and Yosemite--are soft without being mushy and gently referential without being at all literal.

Next door at the Momentum Gallery, yet a starker contrast hits the viewer. Ojai-based multimedia artist Alberta Fins’ “Immersed” (see profile in this issue) entails works that have been fogged over, gnarled, burnt, chewed up and spit out into murky, engaging forms.

It’s a few blocks and a world away to the Ventura Museum of History and Art, the most staid gallery on the Gallery Walk.

“California on Canvas: The Santa Paula Collection,” the current exhibition in the Hoffman Gallery, embodies the marriage of regional history and art that is the museum’s mandate. More on that story in a future column.

Finally, it was off to the figurative and literal outskirts, to the two Art City outposts in the industrial end of town. Art City I, with its generous gallery space and outdoor sculpture bonanza, is an enticing garden of funky delights.

Inside, City father Paul Lindhard’s tall “Diaphanous Shaft,” of Greek marble, stands like an elegant phallic sentry. In the back room is the more outrageous kinetic and polemical stuff. A large collaborative piece looks like a makeshift confessional, with Tennessee Ernie Ford crooning along with news reportage, references to the Gulf War, religious palliatives and other vague social ills tossed into the jury-rigged art salad.

Hanrahan (one of the recurring names on the Gallery Walk) is responsible for the sexual-politically charged “The Medium Is the Massage,” in which a large electric massage unit is placed upright behind a drawing of an idealized nude woman on transparent cellophane.

And where would Art City be without a hint of internecine controversy? Lotar Ziesing’s “Art by Association” is conspicuous by its absence. Sketches outlined on the wall where his pieces were to be hung were replaced by a cryptic message reading “lack of appreciation of its satirical commentary by a few zealous individuals.”

If this Gallery Walk was any indication, zealous individuals, with different agendas, are taking over Ventura. After traipsing from one end to the other, many intrepid hoofers can safely report that Ventura’s art pulse is a healthy one.