Salinas painter John Cerney's art makes reality look small.

This artist''s studio is an industrial warehouse. His favorite tool is a post-hole digger. His gallery is the great outdoors and his audience is everyone who drives along expecting to see nothing more than the same old hillsides and farms.

But around a curve or down in the valley, the space fills up instead with giant field workers harvesting lettuce, babies in cornfields, storefronts crowded with patrons and merchants and old cars so life-like that motorists ask themselves "Is it real or is it...?"

The giant reproductions of real people are the work of Salinas artist John Cerney. They''re growing today in lettuce fields along highways around the Salinas Valley and spreading into Southern California, Arizona and even into Iowa cornfields.

Among the most prominent local displays are the bigger-than-life field workers along Highway 68 south of Salinas.

"The original two figures with their back to the highway are the biggest step in my whole career," says Cerney. Until doing these for Crown Packing in 1995, Cerney''s outdoor art consisted of murals and life-size figures. But he wanted to do something more.

"It''s a bigger statement. I''ve not seen other people attempt to do it," comments Cerney. "When I finally decided to work big, I thought of Chris Bunn (general manager at Crown Packing). He''d wanted to do something. It''s a classic scene, it worked perfectly," adds Cerney.

"I was tired of people bad-mouthing agriculture," explains Bunn, "thinking everything comes out of a bag or carton. I was trying to show the community it takes a lot of people to grow food, that farming is a good occupation and that people work in the field to produce good food for us."

The two original figures in the middle of the field have been joined by a four-man harvesting crew nearer the roadway and will soon be joined by three ladies tending the crops. All the figures "are real people who have worked with us," says Bunn.

Cerney creates his commissioned scenes by starting with an idea, posing real people--usually employees or friends--as models and taking "many, many photos, 50 or 60, to get the right pose," which he then transfers to a special plywood covered with a smooth paper finish.

Sometimes he paints alone, but often now he is assisted by Dong Sun Kim, a mural painter in Marina. "Mr. Kim is better at skin, really a subtle thing," says Cerney. "Mr. Kim has been painting for years and has the technique down for a certain effect. I''m still learning," he adds.

The giant cut-outs are prepared in sections and then joined to form people 18 to 20 feet tall. Cerney likes to do his own installation, setting the cut-outs on 4-by-6 posts set in concrete.

The "one negative," says Cerney, is that "they don''t last forever. Five or six years is pretty good." He periodically repaints his work but "when I''m dead and gone, my work will be dead and gone." Nevertheless, he prefers it to "something to put in the living room."

While about 90 percent of Cerney''s work is commercial murals people want for their businesses, he also does vanity cuts for birthdays, gifts and the like, including animals and people. Cost can range from several hundred dollars for a dog or cat to several thousand dollars for a giant person.

"I''m not a great artist," says Cerney. "It''s more about humor. You can laugh at it. When people are going from point A to point B, just driving along, I like to catch someone in a state of blah," he continues, "Then they see it and go ''Wow!'' I like the feeling of discovery. People notice it and ask questions. I want people to see it and get a kick out of it."

Cerney didn''t start out to be an artist or a humorist. After graduating from Salinas High School, he worked in the produce industry for about nine years, his jobs ranging from forklift driver to dispatcher.

"My younger brother Phil was an artist," comments Cerney. "Now he''s in the insurance business. I dabbled in art when I worked in produce, painting signs, etc. I painted a truck with little cartoons--it was really fun," he continues. But jobwise, "I got frustrated with the progression of where I was going; I didn''t want to be a salesman."

So Cerney went back to school at Long Beach State University and took an art class. "I liked it," says Cerney, "so I took another and another. I sought out artists I could talk with and learn from."

After getting his degree, he went back to work in produce in Salinas. His "break" came when a friend got him a commission to do a portrait. "I quit my job. I lived in [Los Angeles] with one job for a $1,000 portrait. I''d never got more than $300," he relates, "but that job led to another job and another job. I got all the work I could handle."

That work included intricate portrait drawing for the cast of the TV show "Growing Pains," and celebrities John Candy and Wayne Gretzky. "I had done a few murals," notes Cerney. "It was more pleasure than doing portraits that few people would see."

While working in Southern California, he divided his time between Los Angeles and Salinas. "Then I did something that kept me here, something really stupid," says Cerney.

He put up his first outdoor display on a hillside along Highway 101 just south of the Big Red Barn (in the area near Aromas). The baseball mural, titled "Enjoy the Game," depicts a crowd of almost 100 watching a baseball game, with four smaller billboards promoting vegetables grown in the Salinas Valley and a 1951 car. As part of the crowd he included his dentist and his friends, something he still likes to do.

"It really got me into trouble," tells Cerney. "I was so excited about the project, I didn''t ask Caltrans." The land, it turned out, was zoned for grazing, not the commercial zoning required for billboards. He managed to work out the legal details, but was still left with fees to pay and a problem. "I''d been living on the money [I got] for the billboard. I stayed and paid it back."

He paid it back by getting more jobs, which decorate more and more of the local landscape. Cerney''s work includes the cow being milked along Highway 101, the accident scene at Abbott Street and Blanco Road in Salinas, and the National Steinbeck Center billboard, and the "customers" and truck at Sam''s Produce Stand on Highway 68 just south of the city.

Other works in the area include a glass shop in Seaside and Wizard''s Caf‚ in Hollister along with about a dozen smaller figures around Salinas and the mural at Fresh Express in Salinas.

"I do a lot of farm stuff because I live here and people ask me to do that," says Cerney, although recurring favorite themes are baseball and old cars. "I''d rather get more bizarre, have more of a stamp so people know they''re mine," he explains. "Like a barn that looks so real people would drive by every day and not realize for months [that it''s not real]. Or a fast food place on a highway in the desert but no exit so you can''t get there." cw