Wilshire Center

Michael Lawrence spent a good portion of his life in Europe, and his bright, loosely rendered watercolors have an old-fashioned, Roman-holiday feel, with caricatured figures engaged in little pockets of intense activity.

Circus themes are ubiquitous, but their joyous minglings of cowboys, clowns, doves, big yellow cats and commedia dell’arte figures tend simply to recycle bland humanist cliches. The pieces with a sharper, fresher appeal seem to emphasize the complex variety of life, the chance occurrences that surround whatever specific sight we may have singled out to watch.

In “Birth of Venus,� a reenactment of the Botticelli painting on the stage of some provincial theater is accompanied by a view of chatting stagehands and a fellow who seems to have wandered into the scene by accident. Floating in Lawrence’s typically gravity-resistant space are a priest, an angel, the Colosseum and a sad clown figure holding a picture (a movie poster?) of a woman’s head. (Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., to Sept. 7.).