Local Sampler of Small Works

Deep in the heart of the Montrose, tucked into a commercial plaza off the quaint, redeveloped Honolulu Avenue, is the local art showroom of Village Square Gallery. It’s humble in scale, but a fully functional place to exhibit and view art.

And, for the moment, the gallery seems properly stocked and fitted with a diverse show of small pieces. Artist-owner Charles Borman invited several artists, most of whom have ties to the gallery, to submit two small images each. The resulting sampler makes for a pleasant outing and offers a selective glimpse at art made on this eastern-most edge of the Valley.

Landscapes of all flavors are popular among these artists. Borman himself shows pint-sized paintings of the Grand Canyon, all horizontal layers and loosely fitting jigsaws of rock pieces. Meredith Olson draws on a spare, airy watercolor technique to depict subjects like “Leaving Los Olivos,” a bucolic vista--and a far cry from the chic desperation of “Leaving Las Vegas.”

From the computer realm, Roy Walden’s digital graph “Narcissus in Mosaic” is a bit of a technical in-joke. It depicts a woman viewed in chunky, digitized units--like a computer printout with terrible resolution. But a much sharper image of the same woman appears in a necklace. The work’s subtext seems to refer to the strained relationship between reality and its digital counterpart.

Husband and wife Fara and Lee Wexler are former locals, now relocated to Washington state. She shows gauzy figurative pieces while he, landscapes. Gerald Brommer romanticizes an opulent white house in the watercolor “Bermuda White” and Walter Askin deals in quasi-primitive imagery with “Cane Mutiny”--as in walking canes, transformed into comical icons.

Other artists look to the celestial and/or extraterrestrial. For Ellen Grim, the subject of angels is ripe fodder for artwork, in watercolor and collage, while Al Porter has trained his artistic sights on the Hale-Bopp comet, seen as a mystical orb slicing across the night sky and binding us to the previous generations that also gazed upon this fleeting projectile.

Overall, the art in the gallery is less bound by theme, or even standards of quality, than by size. But it’s worth a look-see.

* “Small Images,” through Saturday at the Village Square Gallery, 2418 Honolulu Ave. Suite C, Montrose. Thursday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m.; (818) 244-4257.

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Hodge Podge-ing: The show at the Finegood Gallery, the seventh annual “Art of Our Generations,” is a kindly and chaotic all-under-one-roof group effort. It doesn’t even attempt to find a thread of unity in its sprawl of artworks on display, and, inevitably, the eye drifts over the walls, looking for art that speaks to the viewer--a subjective process, as always.

Among the more impressive works is Sig Cohen’s vaguely narrative piece, “Father’s Day--1982,” hinting at some unspecified angst or domestic turmoil. An older man, slumped in a chair and with verdant fields in the background, is seen next to--and a world away from--a younger man, whose back is to us, and who faces a barren desert. Some intergenerational tension is implied, but left open to interpretation.

Cherie Tibor shows both an amicable portrait of a young woman, “Marlene,” and an appealing enough still-life, reflecting the tart sensuality of lemons. By contrast, Bert Miripolsky shows abstract canvases, with a Franz Kline-ish quality.

The obvious influence of other celebrated 20th century artists surfaces in the show: Mondrian in Stanley Burney’s “Tango”; Degas in Florence W. Kandel’s “Dance Bellenina”; and Modigliani in Anita Kremen’s nude study, duly attributed “With Thanks to Amedo.”

* “Art of Our Generations,” through Aug. 22 at Finegood Gallery, Bernard Milken Jewish Community Center, 22622 Vanowen St., West Hills. Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; (818) 587-3300.