It’s Your Life : ABSTRACTION : 2 Visions on View at Restaurant

Ojai-based artist Margaret Sheppard, whose art now hangs in the posh/rustic spaces of Wheeler Hot Springs restaurant, seems to enjoy working freely and expansively in delicate quarters.

Her art, in acrylic and watercolor, dances along that crumbly precipice between the decorative and the poetic, but usually favors the latter. Realism is only a mild concern. Dancers become abstract forms creating rhythmic skeins across a canvas, and glassware still-lifes or furling fabric become studies in light and color more than reportage.

Bill Kaderly’s art, in another niche of the restaurant, comes from a different place, entirely. An Ojai-based furniture-maker, Kaderly has reduced his expressive palette to ever simpler means, to the point where now an insinuating line or two does the trick.

Kaderly cuts white lines out of black mat board, creating a subtle sense of depth, although the going is strictly linear. There’s little secret that the predominant theme here is the female form, suggested in erotically vague arcs and curves, all the more sensuous and alluring for what isn’t stated.

* Art by Margaret Sheppard and Bill Kaderly, through July 30 at Wheeler Hot Springs, 16825 Maricopa Highway, Ojai; 646-8131.