From the Santa Monica Observer (Oct. 13, 2003):

From its earliest days as a seaside retreat from the hustle and bustle ofLos Angeles,Santa Monica's coastline and cityscape have delighted travelers from around the world, and have inspired so many to settle here. Author Raymond Chandler and artist Richard Diebenkorn were impressed with the beauty of theSanta MonicaBay, Horace McCoy wrote of the lost souls who danced the night away onSanta Monica's pier during the Depression, and countless films have sungSanta Monica's aesthetic praises. Now, longtime Santa Monican Elena Allen is the latest artist to find solace and inspiration in the shapes and colors ofSanta Monica's spectacular coastline and cityscape. In "Scapes and Escapes" at the Schomburg Gallery at Bergamot Station, Allen pays homage to her home town, reconfiguring its unique position at the end-of-the-continent in strange yet hauntingly familiar ways. In her surreal oil paintings, Allen incorporates Picasso cubism with Matisse color and Wayne Thiebaud's love for the shapes of theCaliforniacity to shed new light on theSouthern Californiaurban experience.

Much of "Scapes and Escapes" examines theLos Angelesshoreline, with an emphasis on the city's interaction with the coast and ocean. While her "Ebbtide" is a hauntingly lonely study of a simple built-upSouthern Californiacoastline, "Sea Routes" and "Jurisdictions" juxtapose the serenity of the sea mists with the brashness of theLos Angelesfreeway system. Allen also includes a three-part celebration of theSanta Monicapier and its fantastic carouselbut with each painting delivering its own distinctive moodbrightness, excitement, color, and solitude. Her abstract rendition ofPalisadesPark, "Don't Go Beyond This Point," is a wonderfully incongruous mixture of sweeping curvature and cubism.

While "Scapes and Escapes" is predominately a celebration ofSanta Monica, two of Allen's most poignant paintings allude to other familiarLos Angelessites. "Summer Bowling" is a love poem, an ode to the delights of youth and summertime romance at the Hollywood Bowl. "Valley Girl" takes the misshapen form of a Picasso-type nymph and places her happily, glowingly floating over the lights of theSan Fernando Valleybelow in an evocatively optimistic reversal of Picasso's often-grotesque treatment of women in portraiture. Allen also incorporates cubistic elements in "Burnt Sienna," "For Rent," and "Don't Step on the Grass" to playfully reinterpret theLos Angelesarchitectural landscape.

Fortunately, much in Allen's work is left to imagination and interpretation, as theSouthern Californialandscape is powerfully reconfigured as an abstract but still accessible series of rooftops, ocean, buildings, and curving roads. With her adventurous use of yellows, ochres, and sky and water blues (typically coastal colors), and with her bands and contrasts of frames that are often strikingly hard-edged, she invokes scenes that are abstract, yet recognizable. In this way, often amusingly or magically, Allen forces the viewer to reconsider his/her visual relationship withSouthern California.

It is interesting to note that while Allen has emerged from a period of painting nudes and portraits (two of which are on show), most of her paintings show few or no people; instead they show a city obviously full of people-constructed shapesbuildings, roads, flags, and piersbut one that's oddly empty. It's as though we were being invited to anticipate something about to happen or to reconstruct what has already happened, to experience the city and its context in a dream or reverie, almost as children might do.

While visitors will find some paintings more forceful than others, and one or two of them less integral to the sixteen-piece exhibition, the Schomburg Gallery has identified a real local talent in Elena Allen who, with this show, impressively and emphatically adds her name to the growing list of artists who help us to better feel and understand the city in which we live. "Scapes and Escapes" will show at Bergamot through November 11th.

"Scapes and Escapes": Paintings by Elena Allen is at the Schomburg Gallery,BergamotStationArtsCenter,2525 Michigan Avenue, E3A,Santa Monica,CA,90404. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday,11AM-6PM. The Schomburg Gallery is located just above the Gallery of Functional Art at Bergamot Station. For more information, call 310.453.5757 or visit www.schomburggallery.com, which features a selection of paintings from the show.