Dan Mccleary

Along with the pungent odors of paint and thinner, Dan McCleary's studio is redolent with the smell of baking bread. His tiny storefront is next to a Mexican pastry shop near MacArthur Park. He is so familiar with the owners that when he wants a cup of coffee, he walks behind the counter and helps himself. A person getting a cup of coffee is a recurrent theme in McCleary's paintings along with everyday experiences like going to the bank or waiting at a restaurant.

On weekday evenings, a white van circles the neighborhood of Lafayette Park west of downtown Los Angeles. The driver, William Correa, is killing time. Sometimes, instead of motoring, Correa goes to the library for a couple of hours and reads or watches movies. Other times he goes shopping or has a snack to hold him over until dinner. At 6:30, the waiting is over. He picks up his two sons at HOLA, or Heart of Los Angeles--a nonprofit after-school program -- and drives them home to Paramount.

On weekday evenings, a white van circles the neighborhood of Lafayette Park west of downtown Los Angeles. The driver, William Correa, is killing time. Sometimes, instead of motoring, Correa goes to the library for a couple of hours and reads or watches movies. Other times he goes shopping or has a snack to hold him over until dinner. At 6:30, the waiting is over. He picks up his two sons at HOLA, or Heart of Los Angeles--a nonprofit after-school program -- and drives them home to Paramount.

Along with the pungent odors of paint and thinner, Dan McCleary's studio is redolent with the smell of baking bread. His tiny storefront is next to a Mexican pastry shop near MacArthur Park. He is so familiar with the owners that when he wants a cup of coffee, he walks behind the counter and helps himself. A person getting a cup of coffee is a recurrent theme in McCleary's paintings along with everyday experiences like going to the bank or waiting at a restaurant.

Dan McCleary has painted the tattered respectability of ethnic blue-collar life about to erupt into a Catholic idea of sin. If this is L.A., it's a side most Westside WASPs don't see tucked away in truckers' houses in Boyle Heights or on the lake in Elysian Park. These psychologically saturated B-movie melodramas were interesting, but now, thank goodness, McCleary has let up to concentrate on his sometimes wobbly painting.

Time was when appreciating contemporary art according to subject matter was regarded as gauche and irrelevant. Neo-Expressionism has changed all that, at least as much as did Surrealism and Pop before it. So we are free to be fascinated by the milieu depicted in 25 recent paintings and graphics by L.A. artist Dan McCleary.

This is a story about an embattled art form that refuses to die. The subject? Portraiture. True, it isn't what it used to be. Photography and electronic technology have made images of people so plentiful that the notion of having a portrait laboriously painted or sculpted seems a bit archaic. Portraiture has also taken a hit from 20th-Century guilt. Unless you move in certain rarefied social circles, it just isn't cool to glorify yourself in a grand portrait over the fireplace.

* Dan McCleary (Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., [323] 658-8088). Paintings include "Woman Reading" (2002), above, an oil on canvas work. Ends Friday.

In his latest series of paintings, Jerome Sander begins to break away from his usual formal and psychological explorations of the male-female couple and focus instead on the figure as a historical motif. Employing flat colors in a sketchy, reductive style reminiscent of Dan McCleary, Sander quotes from Romanesque, African and Oriental sculptural traditions and filters them through an extremely mannered Neo-Classicism that evokes both De Chirico and Sandro Chia.

Irit Krygier stands at the doorway of the Williamson Gallery at the ARt Center College of Design in Pasadena and greets the guests who have arrived for her eclectic new show," Romance." Krygier, who closed her Santa Monica based Krygier/ Landau Contemporary Art Gallery in 1991, has welcomed plenty of art buffs to plenty of shows, but tonight she's doing it in a relatively new role: She's a guest curator. Her new job is emblematic of the many transformations the L.A.

Dan McCleary has painted the tattered respectability of ethnic blue-collar life about to erupt into a Catholic idea of sin. If this is L.A., it's a side most Westside WASPs don't see tucked away in truckers' houses in Boyle Heights or on the lake in Elysian Park. These psychologically saturated B-movie melodramas were interesting, but now, thank goodness, McCleary has let up to concentrate on his sometimes wobbly painting.

Time was when appreciating contemporary art according to subject matter was regarded as gauche and irrelevant. Neo-Expressionism has changed all that, at least as much as did Surrealism and Pop before it. So we are free to be fascinated by the milieu depicted in 25 recent paintings and graphics by L.A. artist Dan McCleary.

Dan McCleary's paintings of people doing everyday things give shape to the interior worlds we live in when we're not really paying attention to what's going on around us. At Kohn Turner Gallery, a new group of studies on paper and oils on canvas features eight fairly large pictures that vary in their capacity to evoke the presence of inner lives simmering just beneath surface appearances.