Figurative Reality : James Doolin’s mostly noirish landscapes and cityscapes are dramatized with nervous energy. A show of his work inaugurates Santa Ana’s Grand Central Gallery.

Some Southern California observers buy into the myths of a balmy, larger-than-life nirvana; others take a dystopian view. James Doolin--who has been painting stagy, noir-tinged images of city and desert since 1983--manages to have it both ways.

Doolin is the subject of a mini-retrospective inaugurating Grand Central Gallery in Santa Ana. (It’s part of Grand Central Art Center, a vintage downtown building handsomely renovated by Steven Erlich Architects as a headquarters for Cal State Fullerton graduate students in studio art.)

Working on a large scale with a bag of illusionistic tricks, Doolin is a painter of the old school. He is not so much interested in how the world really looks as in distributing real-life details across a canvas to create a sense of drama.

Oddly--perhaps because he was an established artist in his mid-30s when he switched from abstraction to figuration in the late 1960s--Doolin’s style hardly changed over a 25-year span.

“4WD,” from 1983, is painting-as-whodunit: a movie set for a desert dream gone awry. Doolin places viewers inside an empty sport vehicle with a revolver on the passenger seat. Through the windshield, we spy a faintly eerie desert landscape littered with small sharp rocks under a bland blue sky.

Up ahead, a sickly yellow hill spouts eccentric, sheared-off protrusions. The rear view mirror reflects an empty, narrow road. Whoever drove here, armed with suntan oil, a cassette tape, maps and firepower, is nowhere to be seen--or maybe simply getting his makeup touched up for the next scene.

Landscape or cityscape, Doolin’s environments are all animated with a nervous energy--curving lines and swelling forms--that sometimes recalls the paintings of American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton.

A large gray wedge of cloud and curiously identical dark streaks on the freeways give a moody cast to “East Wind,” a 1991 painting reproduced on the cover of Mike Davis’ darkly prophetic new book, “Ecology of Fear.”

Muted color, diverging perspectives and blank spaces also contribute to the feeling of anxiety. The wind-lashed palm tree, a focal point a bit left of center (did Davis pick up on this?) adds just the right trouble-in-paradise touch.

The viewer’s eye sweeps from graffiti inscribed on the bridge in the foreground to the toy-like cars evenly spaced on the freeway and the fragile-looking gray skyline of downtown Los Angeles. It’s easy to miss the backpacker on the sidewalk at the far right, a marginal figure (probably a lost tourist) shunted to the margins of this oddly romantic scene.

You know Doolin is no Davis when you see the series of painting studies he made in the mid-1990s for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority lobby in Los Angeles, portraying Los Angeles in 1870, 1910, 1960 and 2000.

In the 1870 view, a single plume of smoke from a single train rises into the clear air of the young city, a green bowl of cropland with a distant sprinkling of buildings. Ninety years later, smog changes the quality of light to a golden hue, and cars clog a network of arteries.

Cannily, Doolin portrayed the City of the Angels in 2000 as a night view. Whatever the artist’s beliefs, he hardly was at liberty to paint an image of ecological disaster for a city agency. So here we are in paradise again, with the headlights of thousands of cars bejeweling the freeways. Humans tend to be pretty scarce in Doolin’s world, with the exception of “Casino Zombies” (1991). This caricature of elderly gamblers portrays them as humble pilgrims with stooped postures congregating at a neon shrine. The hulking silhouette in the foreground, seen from the rear, is a Doolin signature--a stagy (and superfluous) hint of menace.

Doolin has his own brand of humor, too, seen in “Green Pool” (1983). This landscape of purple and orange hills that appear to be sculpted from rubber looks like a computer-morphed blend of David Hockney and California Impressionism, with a dash of Claymation. A single twig floats decoratively on a perfectly green, perfectly unnatural body of water. It’s nature seen through the eyes of the world’s capital of unreality.

Born in Connecticut and reared in Philadelphia, Doolin came to Los Angeles in 1967, after living the artist’s life in New York and Australia. He abandoned abstraction in the late 1960s while pursuing graduate studies at UCLA.

As it happened, two key members of the art faculty, William Brice and Richard Diebenkorn, were making their own stylistic transitions at that time. Brice was shifting from a form of Expressionism to abstraction based on the architecture of ancient Greece. Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings were an abstract breakthrough in a career that earlier embraced figuration.

Unfortunately for Doolin, being a figurative artist in the 1970s was a death sentence in the art world. Although his monumental 1977 painting of Santa Monica Mall (not in this exhibition) helped win him a Guggenheim fellowship, his tidy illusionism didn’t jibe with the angst-ridden Neo-Expressionists of the early 1980s.

Doolin occupies his own respectable niche, more honored by collectors and art directors seeking book jacket images than by the critical establishment.

And yet he can outfox viewers who would pigeonhole him. In “Psychic” (1998), his subject is an empty blue billboard mounted above a neon-lit storefront. It is dusk, and the surrounding shops--barber, shoe repair--fade into the shadows. But the neon gleams on puddles in the street; the psychic is still open, channeling the weather gods. And the news is good: blue skies for Los Angeles.

* “James Doolin,” Grand Central Gallery, Cal State Fullerton Grand Central Art Center, 125 Broadway, Santa Ana. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Free. Through May 31. (714) 278-7750.