Here’s Johnnys

It’s a peek inside artist Loie Hollowell’s dreams in Beyond the Clouds at the Artisan Gallery, 1901 Del Paso Boulevard. The gallery seems to have been taken over by Hollowell’s “Johnnys,” iterations of a cartoonish, blond-headed boy in a striped T-shirt, until April 27. In “43 Johnnys,” they’ve surrounded a huge bunny calmly sitting in a meadow; in other paintings, they appear in more surrealistic settings that would have made Salvador Dali smile.

Then you’re inside the dream, as the Johnnys have jumped out from the flat space of Hollowell’s cotton-candy-confection-hued oil paintings and into the third dimension of sculpture: little figures in striped shirts with oversized, faceless papier-mâché and plaster heads investigate the room.

Hollowell’s dream state changes channels in a charcoal-on-paper vision of a young maiden peering anxiously at the stormy sky as she stitches up a wounded bear. With a cobbled valley floor stung with quills, “Adrienne’s World,” is a Freudian field day. For more information, call (916) 648-0260.