"When I saw this beautiful space, I had to put something in it," said Tony Natsoulas at the Blue Line Gallery in Roseville.

"Eccentric Imagery," a show of works by nearly 30 artists from across the United States, is the result of his desire, and it fills the large gallery beautifully. In size, scope and quality, it rivals museum shows at the Crocker and illustrates the strength of bringing a true artist's eye to the task of curating a show.

Natsoulas, a nationally prominent Sacramento ceramic artist, has works by many of the artists included in the show in his personal collection, and the show reflects the eccentric humor his own work is known for. But humor is a large category and comes in a variety of forms, from whimsical and silly to satiric and dark-edged. The variety of responses makes for a lively viewing experience that never becomes static.

The title of the show comes from an exhibition that was held at the Michael Himovitz Gallery in the 1980s, and the work Natsoulas has selected is very much of that era in Sacramento. Ranging from fun and funky pieces such as Patrick Amiot and Bridget Laurent's jolly jalopy made of junk to Dan Snyder's macabre "Mask of the Stockbroker Tasting Bull," the show is typical of the humor so many associate with Sacramento-Davis art. But the presence of such outlanders as Oregonian Jim Adams and East Coast artist Ed Bisese shows that the "Sacramento style" of the 1980s has traveled to other parts of the country and is still viable today.

Where did it come from? One can trace its beginnings to the Funk art of UC Davis professors Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest and William Wiley, as well as an infusion of Chicago Imagism, which came to the area via Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, who taught at CSUS in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Arneson's raunchy ceramics, DeForest's whimsical animal paintings, Wiley's wry parables and Nutt and Nilsson's "nut art" formed a nexus of subject and style that many burgeoning Sacramento area artists, Natsoulas among them, found irresistible.

While there were holdouts, particularly the Central Valley landscape painters who rose to ascendency in the 1990s, the Funk spirit lives on as is apparent in the many strong works in the show by Sacramento artists from Suzanne Adan and Mike Stevens to Mick Sheldon and James Piskoti.

Piskoti's "Awake," a kinetic, light- and sound-emitting painting, is the star of the show. Piskoti's work, beginning with his prints of urban subjects and continuing into his recent elaborate paintings, has always been strong when seen in State Fair and Crocker-Kingsley exhibits and it continues to grow in interesting directions. "Awake" is an elaborate moral tale of the dark side of a peaceful neighborhood centered around a young boy carrying a gun and wearing a soldier's uniform.

Sheldon also fabricates moral fables with a lunatic twist in his paintings and new light-box prints, such as "We Sneak the Dogs Into Burning Man" and "BooBoo Watches the Peppers While I Take a Bite out of the Face of Jesus Taco."

I once compared Sheldon's works to the surreal satires of Pieter Breughel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, and I am tempted to do the same with Jim Adams' mordant watercolor and graphite drawings of macabre figures, which also at times remind one of darker versions of works by Nilsson.

The Nutt factor enters in Ed Bisese's "SupaMonsta," a primitivist painting of Superman against the silhouette of a crude and menacing male head, and, of course, the obsessive, fetishistic fables of Adan and Stevens. Another strain centered around junk sculpture and tramp art informs the works of Paul di Pasqua and Clayton Bailey, whose robots made of teapots and other thrift-store castoffs exert a charming presence. Betty Bailey, meanwhile, gives us a pair of beguiling naive watercolors of events in the lives of Arneson and DeForest.

Natsoulas himself is the creator of one of the most elaborate and impressive works in the show, a large, multifaceted ceramic sculpture that illustrates a Japanese folk tale about a wicked creature called a Tanuki who tricks a peasant into eating his own wife for dinner and in turn is tricked by the peasant and his friend the hare into going fishing in a boat made of mud that dissolves, leaving the Tanuki to drown. It's a wonderfully imaginative and suitably chaotic piece.