SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Awash in Colors : Pieces reflecting a wide range of styles are on display at the Gold Coast Watercolor Society exhibition in Ventura.

This month, Ventura is certifiably awash in watercolor.

For whatever regional, sociological, and/or demographic reasons, watercolor artists seem to proliferate in the area. Landscape artists can easily head to the hills or to the sea. Sunday painters can work in a more-fluid medium than oil. Adventurers in the medium can experiment inexpensively.

It doesn’t defy logic that watercolorists flock together, thereby finding solidarity in their interest and strength in their numbers. At the Doubletree Inn in Ventura, the Gold Coast Watercolor Society, a Santa Paula-based organization, is holding its annual juried exhibition.

Lining the walls of the restaurant is a collection of watercolor paintings that serve as a kind of primer in the medium. The work runs the spectrum, from the conventional landscape and floral subjects we might expect, to more-individualized expressions.

For Anna Griffin, the seeping quality of the material is central. She creates abstract fanfares of color soaked into ragged strips of paper.

The trick for Wendy Girton is to “mix” media in an illusionistic way, by using watercolors to give the impression of collage. Judith Snyder, whose work nabbed the “Best of Show” commendation, is a vision of flora turned psychedelic.

Bert Collins’ “2 Shells and 3 Rocks” purposely pares things down to the essentials. He delivers the subject promised in the title, enveloped in ample space and flecked with shadows. Spareness is a virtue not often heeded in this show.

With her portrait of doughnuts, Ellie Freudenstein takes Wayne Thibaud’s cue in lavishing loving artistic attention on trivial confections.

In the canny realism department, there are Judy Koenig’s impressive, almost photo-realistic still-lifes of food. In terms of technical skill and a personalized statement, Koenig’s paintings amount to the finest art on display here.

It doesn’t hurt that her odes to food carry, beneath the pristine surfaces, a wink-wink, nudge-nudge brand of humor.

With his scenes in the park, Robert Wolfe also shows a keen facility for using watercolor in a mode of sharp realism--not an easy task, given the fluidity of the paint. In a clever art-about-art maneuver, Pat Cairns depicts children copying Seurat in chalk on a sidewalk.

Watercolorists of this world suffer their share of stigma. By traditional fine-art standards, watercolor somehow trails far behind oil as a medium of serious artistic intent and innovation.

If the Doubletree show is any indication, that stigma is only half-justified. What is a medium for if not celebration and insubordination?

Downtown Roundup

The watercolor trail continues at the Buenaventura Gallery in downtown Ventura. There, Connie Nichols and Dorine Lunceford show their unabashed conservative variations on the traditional watercolorist themes.

Well-crafted and perfectly innocuous, these paintings revel in landscapes (Nichols) and animalia (Lunceford). Lunceford pushes the cute-and-fuzzy buttons with her portraits of bunnies and domestic critters.

Nichols finds inspiration in the outdoors. Actually, the one image which, inadvertently, produces a queasy feeling is her image of a Christo Umbrella sitting in a pond. (It will never be possible to look at Christo’s otherwise benevolently wonderful yellow umbrellas without remembering that the project was responsible for the accidental death of a Camarillo woman. The project’s innocence is lost forever.)

In the group show currently in the gallery, the painting that leaps out of the crowd is Cynthia Bates’ “At’s Bar,” veritably seething with tropical heat.

A selection of determinedly small pieces is highlighted by Terry Werth’s punchy images of, among other things, a Saticoy church.

Different Art Forms

Upstairs at City Hall, Patricia Robinson shows her fairly straight-laced, quasi-impressionistic landscape paintings of agricultural lands in Ventura County.

But the U.K. emigre rightly notes in her statement that “my work takes on, willy-nilly, the act of historical registry. . . .” As the bludgeon of development gradually impacts on Ventura County and threatens its agricultural heritage, landscape painters in the area may serve as preservationists of lost vistas.

Photographer Richard Robinson’s work seems like the polar opposite of his wife’s. He is all about lucid details, formal compositions, looking back to the literal old world of Scottish castles.

Contrasting with the exotic Scottish scenes is a mysterious shot of a bean warehouse in Pleasant Valley. Its corrugated metal walls set up visual rhythm and gleam surrealistically in the late afternoon sun.

Again, we’re brought back home to Ventura County, where beans--and all that they stand for--begin to take on a romantic glow as the sun sets in Southern California.

Birth of a Gallery

The Arlington Gallery, which has operated for years in Santa Barbara, has opened a small gallery in downtown Ventura. Tucked upstairs at the historical landmark Bahn’s Building on Main Street, the gallery is within arm’s reach of that building’s infamous faux wood roof--with a fastidiously rendered plaster surface made to look like wood.

A shifting selection of 19th- and 20th-Century paintings, as well as the works of such local artists as Carpinterian Meredith Brooks Abbott, is the gallery’s focus. And it’s the only gallery in town where you might be told, “Please don’t touch the ceiling.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Gold Coast Watercolor Society show, through Nov. 29 at the Doubletree Inn, 2055 E. Harbor Blvd. in Ventura. 643-6000.

* Connie Nichols and Dorine Little-Lunceford through Dec. 12 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St. 648-1235.

* Patricia and Richard Robinson, at Ventura City Hall. 648-1235.

* The Arlington Gallery, 596 E. Main St., in Ventura. 648-5683.