Review of "Work in Progress:
Live on the SummerFest stage, a Duet for canvas and brush"
Robert L. Pincus

Italo Scanga and Dale Chihuly will take to the stage tonight for SummerFest 2000. They will be the only performers during the increasingly prestigious 19-day chamber music festival who aren't musicians.

Both are artists, internationally renowned ones at that. Chihuly, who presented a sprawling retrospective of his extravagant glass sculptures last year at Escondido's California Center for the Arts Museum, has become something of a celebrity with high-profile projects, such as his massive chandelier for Las Vegas' Bellagio hotel.

Tonight, these SummerFest artists-in-residence will make a painting before an audience in UCSD's Mandeville Auditorium, with live music played by the artistic directors of SummerFest, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, along with a few other musicians. The event is called "Art on Art," as is the name of their collaborative exhibition, which also opens today.

The name of the show suits Scanga just fine.

"Art comes from art," he declares, standing in a thicket of works at his UCSD studio. "Like Gertrude Stein once said about James Joyce, `He smells like a museum.'"

A useful truth, as it's applied to Scanga. He is an intensely passionate student of art history and his radiantly colored, complex pictures pull from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, Cubism and the Italian Baroque. But it isn't the whole truth.

One wide glance around his Pacific Beach studio -- the nerve center of his operation -- and you know that the robust, tousled artist's aesthetics are not that of an aesthete. It is a cornucopia of sights. Aside from his own work, there are shelves of small busts (of the souvenir shop variety), a long table of small pots, candleholders and candelabras, and towering winged angel.

"I love objects," he says with an emphatic, animated gesture. "I have no prejudice about them: kitsch, high art."

Actually, there is hardly anything the 68-year-old Scanga says without emphasis and animation. The same level of energy is evident in his staggeringly prolific output. He is equally gifted as a painter and sculptor. His ceramics and tile work are also full of verve.

"Robert Pincus-Witten (a New York based critic) once called me convulsive, because I make so much work," recalls Scanga. "He was criticizing me, but I didn't care. I love to work."

Anyone familiar with this work would know he's a perfect pick for a SummerFest exhibition. Books on composers make frequent appearances on his bookshelves. And for some time he's been creating paintings, often landscapes, on sheet music as homages, pictorial and sculptural, to composers.

He takes cues from musical instructions when he paints on scores.

"I'm interested in what emotions look like visually. What does allegro look like visually? Or con fuoco (with fire)?"

On one of these pictures, "Presto Agitato" -- which translates as fast and excited -- led Scanga to render raylike shapes, slicing horizontally outward from a house. A particularly seductive image, with red trees underneath a silver moon and rippled sky, displays the phrase "con moto simplicita" -- with much simplicity.

There are portraits as well: of each composer-in-residence; and, in tandem, of the artistic directors of SummerFest, who are husband and wife. As with other works by Scanga, these are brightly colored and contain pictures within pictures. There is a symbolic sky with planets at the center of each. Along the top is a landscape and at bottom, a painted photograph of the subject.

Scanga, who has taught at UCSD since 1978, has known Chihuly, * 58, even longer. They met a decade earlier; Scanga was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design and Chihuly was a graduate student. But to hear Scanga characterize their relationship, he has gleaned essentials of life from his younger friend.

"He has been so influential to me. He's totally involved in a work ethic. I learned that from him. He's also taught me about generosity and giving."

Scanga also finds Chihuly's way of thinking fascinating.

"Dale works against his good taste. He has the best taste of anyone I know. But if he knows he should put blue on something, he'll use green instead."