VISUAL ARTS / LEAH OLLMAN : 2 Shows Draw From Palettes of San Diego-Centered Artists

San Diego primps its plumage a bit this month in exhibitions of two artists whose long careers centered here.

Alfred Mitchell, hailed in the 1950s as “the Dean of San Diego Painters,” moved here in the early years of this century, beginning his study of art under the impressionist painter Maurice Braun. After further grounding in anatomy, still-life and portrait painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the obligatory cultural tour of Europe, Mitchell settled back in San Diego in 1922, remaining here until his death 50 years later.

“Sunlight and Shadow: The Art of Alfred R. Mitchell 1888-1972,” at the Museum of San Diego History in Balboa Park (through July 31), scans each phase of Mitchell’s prolific career, dwelling longest on his luminous landscapes of the 1920s. From his earliest days, painting under Braun’s tutelage, Mitchell was seduced by Impressionism’s freshness of palette and brushstroke. Nuances of light and color dominate his work consistently, and he excelled at conveying the blanket of light that softens Southern California’s hills.

Although Mitchell’s reverence for nature never falters, the freshness of his vision does, and, over the years, many of his landscapes drag under the weight of predictability. Others suffer not from bland restraint, but from its opposite, an enthusiasm for color that strays into garish, graceless display.

At his best, though, Mitchell was able to inject spirit and immediacy into even the most conventional of formats. His “Standing Female Life Study” (1920) vibrates with an energy belying the staleness of the academic assignment. A few years later, in a portrait of his wife, Dorothea, Mitchell captures the very strength and pride that prompted him to characterize her once as a “thoroughbred,” a woman “made of high metal.” When he breathes this same vitality into his landscape paintings, Mitchell’s work ranks among the best of this region’s Impressionists.

“In the Valley” (circa 1920), a monumental painting of sun-bleached hills seen through the tall, slender trunks of eucalyptus, epitomizes Mitchell’s skills in color and composition. With a glorious wave of blue foliage, he electrifies the otherwise subtle passage from the pale ocher hill to the golden field below. At the same time, he uses the thin, vertical lines of the eucalyptus to slice space into irregular bands, lending a dynamic rhythm to an otherwise static scene.

Mitchell compressed space in his paintings in this way repeatedly throughout the ‘20s, screening a distant view with foreground trees or flowers so that the scene as a whole might be read in terms of its shapes and colors as much as its represented forms. This concept smacked of modernism, though, and Mitchell, being impatient with such abstractions, made sure he stuck fairly faithfully to his sources in nature. As noted in the show’s well-researched catalogue, Mitchell regarded modernism’s “life force (as) purely artificial.”

It may have been the abstracted landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, however, that inspired Mitchell to paint an elegant series of desert scenes in the late ‘40s. He was moved by her work when he saw it in 1946, and the rich desert views that he subsequently painted share her simplified vocabulary of forms. The vigor of Mitchell’s work had begun to atrophy by then, and the bold, reductive forms of these paintings renewed, at least temporarily, that energy.

Mitchell continued to paint, make his own frames and participate actively in local art organizations until his retirement in 1966. Reconstructions of the artist’s outdoor setup and studio--he usually painted small studies en plein air and enlarged them indoors--help round out the informative and, at times, inspiring view of Mitchell’s life offered by this show and its catalogue. The catalogue, written by Thomas R. Anderson and curator Bruce Kamerling, was funded by The Fieldstone Company and Gerald and Bente Buck.

Also calling San Diego home for most of her long artistic career is Ethel Greene, whose paintings can be seen through July 30 at the Mathes Cultural Center (247 S. Kalmia St., Escondido).

In 1970, shortly after Greene began the series of surrealist works on view here, she said that she regarded all but a few of them as “purely jokes.” Sure enough, the majority of the paintings in “The Strange Reality of Ethel Greene: Selected Surrealist Works 1969-87” are one-liners that can be grasped in an instant and dismissed with a single chortle.

Greene releases everyday objects from the constraints of reason and gravity in the manner of the first generation of surrealist painters, especially Rene Magritte. In Greene’s paintings, a pig in sunglasses soars through the sky, a lion wears a wristwatch, cows mill about on the Capitol steps, fried eggs dangle from tree limbs and a bed hovers over the sea.

Logic is repeatedly overturned and historical time is skewed in quiet collisions of ancient and contemporary worlds. The results neither tantalize nor disturb, however; their obvious humor lends them only a stultifying one-dimensionality.

Greene studied art in Boston before moving to San Diego as a technical illustrator in 1943. She has been painting full time since 1955. In most of her paintings here, she avoids the clarity of crisply defined forms, giving the surfaces instead a grainy quality, as if the scenes were viewed through a fine mist. This suits the dream-like quality of the imagery but fails to elevate it to a level of affecting fantasy.

The only faintly engaging images are those where Greene places a gleaming, oversized egg in a disjunctive setting--on a litter-strewn curb, a rocky spire overlooking a trail of women’s clothing, or filling an entire shopping cart in an abandoned Safeway parking lot. The egg, at least, with its connotations of birth, latent energy and concealment, nudges these images beyond the facile punning that deadens the rest.