Energy and Eroticism

When Encino-based artist Rachelle Mark showed her work at Orlando Gallery a year and a half ago, the subject was, strictly speaking, Amazonian. She created paintings inspired by a trip there, dense imagery that documented the natural power of the place while extracting useful metaphors from its depths.

Her current show is less grounded in external wonder. It’s more about introspective journeys, calling up issues of spirituality and personal nostalgia.

This is not to suggest that Mark’s new work is more subdued. If anything, last year’s show was more controlled by the cohesion of its theme, compared to this show’s wildly varied selection of pieces. With this work--involving portraits, assemblage and mixed-media concoctions--she seems to veer in multiple directions, testing waters, exploring options.

Idyllic bursts of nature are found, in a biblical context, in “Third Day of Creation.” The meeting of music and religious ideals informs the undulating surfaces of “Islamic Melody.” References to music--an abstract, ephemeral language--resurface in “Serenade.”

Sometimes, she draws on collage technique, planting overlapping images in a horizontal format, which naturally suggests narratives. She conjures up a loose, abstractly anecdotal sense of a scene in “Chez Shtettl” and “Crossing the Rubicon.”

Ladders, symbols of transcendence or transition, appear with regularity in the midst of her pieces, and become the focus of “Jupiter’s Ladder” and “Ladder of Time.” In the former, a bamboo-like golden ladder juts from the fiery orange and blue painting behind it, an emblem of deliverance amid our earthly passions and pains. What Mark’s show lacks in focus, it gains in intensity of spirit.

As for the sculptural segment of this two-person show, entitled “On & Off the Wall,” Gail Glikmann shows mostly languid female-nude pieces that are hard to decipher. Are they really as garish as they seem, or is there some ulterior, ironic agenda at work here? With hope, there is.

The nudes tend to arch their backs, jutting out breasts and exuding erotic abandon. A double take is in order when we find the hirsute figure of Moses, with back arched and gazing heavenward, in a different kind of ecstasy.

In “Anniversary,” a nude couple becomes one in an embrace but are rendered in clear resin, resembling an ice sculpture, destined for melting. Erotic art can be a tricky business, especially when viewers let their imaginations wander.

* Rachelle Mark and Gail Glikmann, through Aug. 29 at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; (818) 789-6012.

Water Based: Watercolorists tend to form organized fronts. Maybe it’s because they’re social animals or, more likely, because there’s a wall of resistance to be battered down, and numbers help the cause.

And so we get shows like the Valley Watercolor Society Juried Exhibition at the Brand Library, a large sampling of area artists working in a dimly lighted corner of the art world. It’s a medium that still suffers a stigma as an also-ran, the domain of hobbyists and people with limited imaginations. But, as with any medium, it’s what you do with it that counts.

Which is not to say that the paintings in this summer show at the Brand take innovation as a byword. It’s a bunch of nice pictures, nicely done and often sentimental, no harm done and some pleasure taken.

There are moments of mild unconventionality in the show, as with Sandra Goldman’s piece--a mixed-media work, really--in which strips of painted and pasted-upon paper peel up from the surface, like teasing flaps. The Best of Show award, in fact, goes not to one of the landscapes or kindly portraits, but to Nancy Del Pesco’s spooky “Things on My Mind,” in which tendrils and gangly matter spring forth from a loosely rendered face, in an image of psychological distraction.

Among the simple pleasures here, Connie Larson admires the dance of shadows on a doorway in “Shadow Lace,” and Vivian Matheson’s “Venice Bikeway” trains its attention on an expanse of lawn flecked with palm-tree shadows. Kristen Barron’s “Aspen Glow” celebrates the simple and profound as the shimmer of golden aspen leaves against deep green.

In a show where the common denominator is medium rather than content, there are bound to be intriguing, telling contrasts. Rockwellian innocence works its candied charm in Rose Sinatra’s “Liberty City,” while Linda Fiedler’s “Somewhere Out There” is an extraterrestrial landscape painting.

Casually rendered realism is the desired mode in Marshall Turner’s “French Canal,” versus the rougher blocks of color that build an engaging image in Robert Tyler’s “Provence”--one of the best pieces in the show. Chris Cavette’s “Marine Reflections” may be exacting and well-crafted, but the eye is seduced more by Len Fischler’s waterside image, “Porto Alegre,” in which a loose assembly of lines, washes and brush strokes create an effectively impressionistic view of a harbor.

* Valley Watercolor Society Juried Exhibition, through Sept. 13 at Brand Library, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. 1-9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday; 1-6 p.m. Wednesday; 1-5 p.m. Friday-Saturday. (818) 548-2051.