Painting the Town : CSUN Art Student Finds Innate Beauty in Valley’s Urban Sprawl

ENCINO — Cruising down Ventura Boulevard past endless strip malls, and the flashy clutter of fast food restaurants, some people might see urban ugliness.

Victoria Polyak sees art.

A Ukrainian immigrant, Polyak thinks the things lining Ventura Boulevard--bars, bakeries, brick buildings and billboards--are signs of bustling commerce and vitality.

“I think the urban landscape is so different,” said Polyak, 33, who came to this country with her husband 10 years ago. “Alongside the palm trees, the sky and the sun, there are billboards, cables and signs that we put there. They tell us about our time.”

Lots of artists live in the Valley, but fewer embrace it in their work. Polyak celebrates it.

She was trained as an architect in her native Ukraine. But when she got here she became enchanted with this city’s fanciful landscapes in a way that perhaps only a foreigner can be and decided to get her master’s degree in art.

Driving down Ventura Boulevard with her is like having your eyes snapped open. She notices the shapes of the buildings and the contradictions between the picture-perfect images of the billboards and the crazy life that swirls below. She sucks it in with an attention to detail that most who are born here never will.

As we coast down the boulevard, she stares up.

“Look at all the billboards,” she says gleefully. “I think there are more now than there used to be.”

She likes to paint in the early morning between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., when the light is clear, and her three children, ages 13, 7, and 6, are in school.

She finds her sites by driving around. She searches for interesting juxtapositions, architecture, compositions and ironies.

In a section of Los Angeles where few people even get out of their cars to walk, she stakes out a spot on the sidewalk, sets up her easel, canvas and oils, and begins to paint.

She stands as she paints, sometimes baking in the sun, often trying to hold her easel steady against the wind that can rush down the wide Valley boulevards.

She peers through four lanes of passing cars at the object of her attention. Her short blond hair is pulled back into two lopsided ponytails.

As a plein-air painter (the name comes from a school of French impressionists who painted outdoors) in a city with little street life, she is a rarity. Store owners come out to see what she is doing and curious passersby stop to ask her questions. As the painting progresses, she says, people stop for longer and longer.

She talks to them all.

“Sometimes people stop, people who have never seen art except on TV, or in a magazine, but never an oil painting like this,” she says.

She said people in working class neighborhoods are more interested in her than those in wealthier neighborhoods, sometimes surrounding her to watch.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Why are you painting this?’ ” she says. “They say, ‘We look at this spot every day, but you made it look so good.’ ”

She said Latinos are almost always interested, and the question they usually ask first is how much it costs. Older people sometimes view her nostalgically, she said, as if they saw more people like her, painting in the open air, when they were young.

Polyak’s paintings show unlikely subjects: a view of the planes at Van Nuys Airport or a construction site on Countess Place in Encino. The majority show stretches of Valley boulevards with their hodgepodge of signs and storefronts.

“Welcome to California,” shows a cracked patch of soil, a graffiti-splashed wall near a tired street corner and a stop sign smack in the middle of the picture, all beneath a giant billboard reading, “Welcome to California.”

“Big Boy” shows a giant fat man doing the splits on a billboard above a cluster of food markets, showing “our obsession with food,” she said.

Her paintings, done in the stark style of photo-realism, are so true-to-life that neighborhood folk can pick out familiar details and friends. When she took her paintings to be framed, the store employee picked out a scrawl of graffiti in one work and said his friend had painted it.

In another work, a figure of a homeless woman walks by a store called “Cinderella Dreams.”

“Two homeless men were watching me painting, and they recognized her, even though she is kind of sketchy,” Polyak said. “They said, ‘This is Ginger, I think.’ ”

Painting on the street, Polyak herself often becomes part of the street life.

Once, when she was painting near the intersection of Woodman Avenue and Burbank Boulevard, two cars crashed in front of her. Another time, in front of the Cal Fed building on Ventura Boulevard, near Petit Avenue, she saw police officers about a block away gesturing to her. Reluctantly, she left her wet painting on the easel and walked away. It turned out there was a bomb threat or a bank robbery going on inside, she never found out which.

Cal State Northridge art professor Bruce Everett, who serves as Polyak’s thesis advisor, said in his 30 years of teaching he cannot recall another student highlighting the Valley as Polyak has.

“I see those subjects she chose as being pretty prosaic and without much charm. Certainly without beauty,” he said. “And she sees them as fascinating.”

“What is so interesting about Victoria’s work is that she sees it with such fresh, open eyes. That she is so joyful to be here.”

Polyak is still a student, but she does what artists are supposed to do: She makes you look at what is around you in a different way. She says she just paints what’s there.

“L.A. composed them,” she said, surveying 15 works from a recent exhibition at Cal State Northridge now stacked against furniture in her living room. “I’m just finding those compositions.”

To check out some of Polyak’s works on the Internet, go to https://www.freshportfolio.com, click on “review”, go to “graduate students” and then look in the “illustration.”