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By Dan Leone

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OAKLAND-BASED artist Jeannie Lydon says she finds inspiration on city streets and in real-life adventures, but her paintings hark back to a much earlier era. Stick-shift bicycles and biplanes are the primary images that show up repeatedly on her canvasses. Sometimes they are painted, other times screen- or linoleum-printed over a patchwork background of lines, shapes, and occasionally a stray floating symbol that might or might not be some kind of compass or map marking. The effect is an interesting combination of antique and contemporary, detailed and abstract. Lydon's printing techniques give the old machines in many of her works a delicate appearance, as if she traced them on top of the fog of memory, denying the iron and steel with which they were made and reducing each solid structural element to a faint, ephemeral outline. Her limited use of color also adds to the mood of antiquity; the world she paints is not quite black-and-white, but almost, suggesting that she is not so much representing what she sees or remembers as she is imagining some kind of past world. Her paintings are like scrapbook pages from someone else's life, decontextualized and unexplained. The bicycles, cars, and planes seem chronologically specific at first – casting her as a kind of Beryl Markham of the canvass – but Lydon's method of presenting them evacuates much of their specificity, chronological and otherwise. Her works are a ghostly presence in the gallery, rooted to no particular time or place. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Mon.-Sat., 567 Sutter, S.F. (415) 544-0610. (Lindsey Westbrook)