The art of the city

Julie Bagby has visited the Huntington Beach Art Center a number of times, but never to see her own work on display.

There she was, though, on Sunday, looking at her own work with her son and nephew in tow.

Bagby, 50, of Huntington Beach, is one of 165 local and regional artists with one or two pieces on display as part of “Centered on the Center,” the open-call annual art exhibition at the gallery. Through Feb. 18, the show, partially funded by the Huntington Beach Arts Foundation, gives the community a free ticket to see what’s going on artistically in the city, Director Kate Hoffman said.

The show has grown in the 11 years Hoffman has been there, and adding any more artists to the show would be too much for the center’s space, Hoffman said.

“It’s challenging to put sense and order to a show with this much variety,” Hoffman said.

The exhibit’s displays were organized into sometimes distinct, other times blurred categories. Photographs line one wall in the back. Another wall features still-life works teeming with images of all kinds of fruit while other walls show work with no discernible explanation. Watch where you are walking, though, because not all the work hangs on a wall. In one of the back exhibit rooms, a large preying mantis constructed of polished wood stands on its hind legs; in another room, there’s a pair of metal bugs by another artist.

It seems that Bagby’s ambition grew with the size of her pieces. Bagby was painting note cards, only a few inches in length and width, when, prodded by her nephew, she made the leap to a 4-foot by 5-foot canvas. The piece — a giant abstract cityscape — ended up nothing like the artist had originally planned, and that does not bother her at all, she said.

Another of Bagby’s pieces — a portrait of John Lennon — hangs on a wall surrounded by some famous and other anonymous faces, both alive and dead.

“Actually, it was my husband’s Christmas gift,” Bagby said. “It was going to go in his office, but you can’t be hoarding art.”

“If someone likes it as much as [I] do, I’d sell any of it in a heartbeat.”

Next to Bagby’s Lennon, portraits of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, Bob Marley, Marilyn Monroe and even a few anonymous faces line the wall.

“There’s always a Marilyn Monroe,” Hoffman said.

Directly to the right of the portrait wall, two works by Newport Beach resident Geraldine Lumian represent the Yin and Yang of their maker. The first, of a Japanese woman titled “Happy Koko,” is filled with color.

The second piece, a black-and-white charcoal close-up of a woman with wisps of hair falling across her face, is called “Charna,” a name derived from the Slavic word for “dark.”

“It was just a name I thought suited the picture, just a name that happens to signify what I thought about it,” Lumian said.

A former special education teacher at Estancia High School in Costa Mesa, Lumian, 75, really dove into art the last eight years — even more when she retired.

“I feel like I am still exploring. I started so late in life, I want to try everything,” she said.

The show is only around for the next month, so stop by and check out some of the local talents — and it’s free. Maybe leave a donation in the box on the way out so shows like this can keep happening, Hoffman said.