Four million years ago, a giant rat, Honda-sized, lumbered the southern hemispheres of earth. It dined on aquatic plants, or, presumably, lily pads. To date, the fossilized remains of this giant rat-thing, called a Josephoartigasia monesi, or, an exterminator's freakmare, is the most monstrous rat-ancestor ever found. Picture a gerbil crossed with a hippopotamus. Yes, this plug head was an artless fellow with its cranium shaped like a tube sock filled with wet sand.

Have I lost you? Probably, if you are a Creationist and any evolutionary weirdness is born from the devil's lying tongue. To you I offer this: ponder an uncomplaining Noah shoveling up all those football-sized rat turds infesting the windowless bowls of his well-meaning ark. "Oy!" he allegedly muttered. "If rats be a necessary creature, would that god had made only pocket mice." 

But back to mice and men. Here's some art colliding both: 

Mr. President, 2006, by Lyn Foulkes. Mixed media. Courtesy of Kent Gallery, NY.

You'll find this piece, and gobs others made by 70 LA artists, at Track 16, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica. It's a new show called SOME PAINTINGS, curated by LA Weekly's art editor Doug Harvey to include "cherished masters and hottest emerging talents". This means that Mr. David Hockney is hung shoulder-to-shoulder with artists kinda known and flat out new. Democracy at work! And what makes this show some grand fun is that if you like paint, scads of it, no hue of the color wheel is left out. And if you like humanity, it's full of it, in all its goopy gloppy, loopy droopy, swirly twirly glee.

Ponder on Saucer-eyed by Dennis Hollingsworth, paint globs thick as frosting when the kitchens of Versailles were in full and shameless swing. Side view.

Saucer-eyed, 2007, by Dennis Hollingsworth. Oil on canvas over wood panel.

And how often do we see a machine made mortal enough to lose its typewriter keys for teeth? Here we have a humanoid typewriter, The Best of Times by Sam Messer. This is art you just might muse on and ask Why? Then you get off your high horse, simmer the hell down, and declare Why not?

The Best of Times, 2008, by Sam Messer. Oil on canvas over panel.

The January 12^th opening was attended by thousands, calculated by how far away I had to park my fucking car and trudge. Art lovers were drunk on either the free wine or a wholesome dose of glee, thrilled to be in one place with so many nice looking freshly-showered folk to ogle and the bonus of solid food, Mexican, catered, gobs of it.

In the parking lot, a black Porsche got trashed, as we all looked on, by a few slender young men who left the mystery of the basis for this conceptual piece to themselves. One of the duo rapped on an iron skillet. It would have been annoying if it weren't art. His compatriot in art-crime threw his arms around him and said, "We're not making art! We're making love!" 

If maturity matters, the most artistically mature piece in the show was actually a huge schnozz. It's wall-mounted and lit from within by a top tier LA artist Jim Shaw who makes enough dough off his work to employ a zillion assistants. Here a young man contemplates the meaning of outsized anatomy. 

And just because I could, a shot taken from below, a sinister nostril view.

Nose Sculpture Wall Sconce (AB Ex. #3), by Jim Shaw, 2007. Mixed media, lights, cord.

A few art gawkers reacted with "Oh my god! A naked man!" to the art model posing royally for a live portrait smack dab in the middle of the show. I held back offering my little lecture about the difference between naked and nude, learned way back in 8^th grade art, Mr. Beasom holding up a portrait of Manet's Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe to a classroom full of muffled snickers. Here, art model Mr. Michael Schmidt, his sword, and his portrait in progress.

How can you not love this duo: a hard-drinking skeleton at the wheel and riding shot gun a toking cat, living large in the backass of some scrabble pan like Cleveland, the rusted out backbone of ye olde America. Here we have an unapologetically exuberant FUCK YEAH by Steve Canaday. Let us weep a single tear of aesthetical nostalgia for the end of such richly gloomy industrial scapes, systematically being pancaked by Home Depot and its ilk.

FUCK YEAH! by Steve Canaday, 2007. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Black Dragon Society.

Karen Carson's On the Beach Series #1 and On the Beach Series #2 are hung as twins. And who cares about the art here? It's all about those zippy frames by way of fin-fendered car design by way of Vegas casino signage by way of the writer who recognized the connection - Mr. Tom Wolfe in his Electric Kool-aid Acid Test 

On the Beach Series #1 and On the Beach Series #2, 2007, by Karen Carson. Acrylic and ink on paper. 

Oh what a forlorn little fellow, trapped in the confines of his simple geometry, destined for a life of over-simplicity carried on narrow stick-feet that no doubt tire much too easily. How I would like to make a stuffed pillow out of him and prop him up in everlasting sunlight. 

Humpty-Dumpty I, 1961, by Michael Olodort. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Diana Zlotnick

I never thought I'd see the ugliest of female undergarments show up in art - the jog bra - but here it is worn by two serious young lady athletes going at it in a lacy paper wonderland.

Struggle Garden, 1996, by Patti Wickman. Oil on canvas.

Here's your mother's womb if it were padded in orange nogahyde.

Interiority, by Brian Cooper, 2007. Oil on panel.

And so, that's just a smattering. But I remind you to never be unaware of what dwells tomblike and skeletal in the La Brae tar pits as metaphor for your comatose soul. It's time to rouse and hail your inner rat, it being the year 2008, just 4 years short of the 2012 Mayan doomsday prophecy that will spin us on our axis to hang from space bewildered and/or extinct. The good news is this: we've got four years left to fuck around and make, or take in, some art. So get your doomsday ass up off the couch and go see some locals doing just that.

SOME PAINTINGS, TRACK 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica. Through February 16, 2008.

ROBYN EWING is LA2DAY'S reporter of Aesthetics-at-Large.

rae@la2day.com