The rain closed down the gallery last weekend but you still have time to see works by local artists celebrating nature’s gifts at Topanga Canyon Gallery through January 29. Debbi Green’s “La Tierra� blazes with exuberant takes on majestic trees, radiant flowers, billowing branches against blue skies and bursts of brilliant color. Kate Browning’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone� takes a more interpretive look, one that feels less celebratory, perhaps even a bit melancholy. She renders her exotic flowers, black skeletonized trees, fading roses as if in motion, with the poignant sense that the life bursting out of them will soon become part of their demise. Support your local artists; these works are available for sale at the Gallery. But come down from the Canyon and into the City for a while. There’s much to be seen at LACMA! Abstraction in Service of the Spiritual I took a morning to view two exhibitions, “Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-1945,� the first comprehensive museum exhibition of this group; and “Afro-Atlantic Histories,� charting the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies in the African diaspora across the “Black Atlantic.� LACMA is displaying 100 carefully selected works from the larger show of 400 objects that originated in Brazil and has traveled to Houston, Dallas, The National Gallery in DC and here. The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) came together as a loose collection of artists in New Mexico whose manifesto declared they would strive “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.� Most of the market and art critics of the time were centered around the East Coast and with the onset of World War II, the group didn’t last long or garner much attention. But their paintings continue to demonstrate how abstraction can be used in service of the spiritual. In fact, in 1986 LACMA pioneered a look into this group and other artists with its landmark exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985.� “Another World� features 80 works by 11 artists, including four from LAMCA’s own collection by Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson, two of the founding members of the TPG, as well as Ed Garman and Agnes Pelton. Of these, it was Pelton’s work that most drew me in. She has a Southern California connection, having spent her last 20 years in Cathedral City after living for a decade in a windmill on Long Island, where she began studying Theosophical writings about spiritual emancipation that would influence her work for the rest of her life. But how to describe paintings by a visionary symbolist, whose abstract work expresses her inner spiritual experience? Sometimes with muted earth tones, often with deeply saturated colors, set off by golden or burnished frames, using botanical and biomorphic shapes with the desert sky, landscape and light as her guiding forces. Where several of the other artists express themselves in abstract geometric compositions, Pelton’s motifs include floating ovals, golden stars, shiny lines, abstracted mountain peaks and light radiating from within symbolically significant shapes and colors.