Art Escape: An Eye for Nature

Alan Gussow's "Surf/Monhegan" (1986) shows how the painter, born and raised in New York City, found a sense of the city's frenetic energy in the violent surf of the Atlantic Ocean, off the Maine coast.

Gussow spent time on Monhegan, an artist's retreat where there are no cars and barely even roads. Instead, painters plant their feet and their canvases and get to work. It all seems perfectly natural. Perhaps it is only when these canvases, capturing nature, are imported into a midtown gallery that they start to seem strange and powerful.

A Gussow show including 25 oil paintings is now on view at Babcock Galleries (724 Fifth Ave., Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) in conjunction with the publication of the first monograph on his work, "Alan Gussow: A Painter's Nature." Those willing to travel to Old Lyme, Conn., can explore Monhegan further in an exhibition at the Florence Griswold Museum devoted to artist colonies of the New England coast, including those at Cos Cob and Old Lyme. It's striking how the colonies, all offering an escape from the city and access to inspiring light and scenery, have produced such different bodies of work. Old Lyme comes off as a picturesque place, whereas Ogunquit and Monhegan have produced a much wider range of responses -- pictures with working men (who were paid to pose with beer), abstractions, bolder colors. (See www.flogris.org for more information).