With Rackstraw Downes, the cliches happen to be true: Time does stand still. His paintings capture a moment. You feel you’re literally there.

Mr. Downes’s work seems disconcertingly ordinary at first. But when you start to look hard at the paintings, you realize that he doesn’t fit into received conventions: He is neither photographic nor old masterly. As he refuses to follow the rules of perspective, odd things

happen with the horizon lines. But there isn’t the expressive naivete that comes from someone awkwardly making it up as they go along.

“Years ago I read a beautiful letter that Stendhal sent his sister, giving her advice on letter-writing,” Mr. Downes told me last week. “He said, ‘choose subjects you care very much about, but when you put your feelings into words, do it as if you didn’t want anyone to notice.’ When I read that, in the seventies, I thought, ‘that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t want anyone to notice the style.’ “

“Of course, they do notice that the horizons are curved, and that there are tilting verticals and so on. But in general, the brushstroke – I don’t want it to draw attention to itself. I don’t want someone to say, ‘Oh, look at that gorgeous chunk of yellow.’ It should be the grass; you can have the chunk of yellow be gorgeous, too, but first it must be the grass.”

This plain look – of paintings packed with details that aren’t fussy – is hard-won. He will only work in front of the subject, which is usually urban landscape, and it takes months for him to complete a painting. There are copious drawings and oil sketches to get through before he can fix his subject, and his commitment to specific light means that as he nears the end he only has precious half-hours in which to work.

Mr. Downes’s first New York painting show since 2000, which inaugurates the new Betty Cunningham Gallery in Chelsea, is a remarkable body of work: 30 canvases beaming with clarity, precision, and freshness. Do they require as much time and energy to appreciate as they do to make, I asked him.

“I think that would be a rather divaish demand,” he replied, with a characteristically impish chuckle. “Alex Katz once said, ‘All you can expect from the audience is seven seconds.'” Mr. Katz was one of Mr. Downes’s influential tutors at Yale, where he studied in the early 1960s. Contemporaries there included Richard Serra and Chuck Close. At the time, Mr. Downes was an abstractionist, and his main teacher was Al Held.

“I remember going to the Whitney Annual before my style was at all formed, and thinking that a good painting is one that has a quick come-on, that beckons you very forcefully from across the room. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be interesting to make a painting that would be totally plain, ordinary, and quiet, but if you spend time sniffing around you find endless stuff that would keep revealing itself?”

Although he resists any label of himself as a maverick, Mr. Downes’s willingness to court the margins with slow, plain painting indicates the kind of tough, bloody-minded individualism that comes across from his work.

“When you look at a Breughel you can find 10,000 stories in it. Someone with an eye for iconography will find 10,000 more than you knew were in there, because they know the contemporary proverbs Breughel was illustrating. And I like that. It’s a quality that I aspire to have in my own painting. ‘Aspire,’ I say,” he added with due modesty.

I’m fascinated to talk with Mr. Downes about the time element because his images work, and are worked, at such varying speeds. His current show focuses exclusively on the finished paintings, but earlier this year at the New York Studio School, where I am gallery director, he showed the extended series of drawings with which he finds his motif and fixes his all-important vantage point. Mr. Downes also makes quick, spontaneous oil sketches that have a life very distinct from the fastidiously worked-up canvases. But he doesn’t like to mix up these different kinds of image in the same show.

“It introduces problems. People get distracted: Is the sketch freer, the color fresher, than the finished work, or else has the new painting made the little one look inconsequential? They don’t go together, sketches and finished paintings, except in a didactic show.”

It occurs to me that the major works of John Constable, a painter whose influence Mr. Downes has acknowledged, have suffered in reputation as a result of the modern fetish with spontaneity: People say the sketches are better than the finished “machines.”

“I don’t endorse that view: I like them both,” said Mr. Downes. “They are two sides of the same man, and they both should be there. We love a bit of flamboyance, someone at a dinner party making an outrageous remark, but we also like it when someone makes a very considered and thought-out statement. I don’t see them as contradictory and I’m not interested in that polarized way of thinking.”

“One thing that is not quite understood is that, although I might stand at a site for three months to finish a painting, certain aspects or bits of that painting may be very spontaneous. A car comes through the painting, and you say, ‘That’s the right color car,’ and whoosh, you dash it in at incredible pace.”

Light and scale are what keep him busiest. “I can’t proceed unless I feel I have grasped the scale of the scene. The brushstrokes should be the right size in relation to the canvas, and that the telephone poll should be the right size in relationship to the bridge. So it is internal representational scale and scale in the structure of the painting.”

What keeps Mr. Downes so long at his subject is a whole range of barely graspable phenomena that have to be right, in an unsentimental way, and according to empirical vision, without resorting to tricks and conventions. “I’m interested in thoroughness, in a sense. One of my favorite paintings in New York is the Theodore Rousseau in the Frick, ‘The Village at Becquigny.’ I adore that painting: It is so realized, so coaxed into fullness of existence.”

He talks a lot about the practicalities of fixing his vantage point. “The drawing is the way you find out where you are going to settle down and work,” he said. “You don’t want to stand on a very busy street corner, especially where trucks are going to park in your way.” But this doesn’t explain the decision to paint the kind of odd, plain, prosaic subjects he is drawn to: the new Millennium Park in New Jersey, with newly planted trees in the foreground and towers in construction on the horizon; a forlorn-looking baseball field in Red Hook Park on an overcast day; ventilation ductwork in an attic in Snug Harbor – a site that has afforded several paintings series.

Knowing something of his concerns for the environment and his Ruskinian disdain for modern technology, I wondered if there is something political in his preference for public over domestic interiors. “I don’t think the political impulse is overt, but it is probably built into my system. I’m not very interested in the idea of comfort. I rather believe that there is a tremendous amount of discomfort on this planet, and it is not equally distributed among the population. And some are able to purchase their way out of that kind of discomfort.”

Mr. Downes said that, when he does look for interiors, they are not of the sort normally associated with painting. “You tend to use the word to mean a bourgeois living room,” he said. “Which is nonsense: There are endless types of interiors which you can paint. And I have not, as you may have noticed, got involved in bourgeois living rooms.” It was the opportunity to paint vacant floors at the World Trade Center that put a roof over his head for the first time in 20 or 30 years.

Mr. Downes never paints people, but there is always a sense of human presence. His Texas landscapes feature water flow-monitoring installations on the Rio Grande and substations along the power grid. It is an unsentimental view of the landscape. This is not the unspoilt Garden of Eden of the Hudson River School by a long shot.

Is human intervention incidental in his landscape vision, or integral? “Absolutely integral. I partly think it is a national issue: I’m British, and we don’t have much in the way of wild nature. Dr. Johnson has some phrase for it. … ‘naked nature.’ He and Boswell got to some Scottish island and that’s all they found, so they got back in the boat and returned to the mainland. They weren’t very interested in ‘naked nature’ and neither am I. Whereas to Ansel Adams it was the ultimate desideratum. But the problem with Adams is that he was standing there with his camera. So come on, buddy: That camera was using metals and chemicals from highly sophisticated, industrial, technological society.”

Earlier in his career, Mr. Downes lived for some years in Maine. “Many of us moved there because there are beautiful hills and mountains and cows and streams and so on. But, when we build a house, we call up the cement-mixer man who comes from a gigantic quarry where they get all this rock to make cement out of and pulverize it and turn it into cement. That is part of your life, too. And I wanted to acknowledge that. I didn’t like the idea of landscape being an escapist genre, which it has the tendency to be.”

Mr. Downes’s attraction to the real and the redolent doesn’t lead to painting that is didactic or critical. His mentors in seeing, he says, were Fairfield Porter and Rudy Burckhardt: “The two artists who looked at the world without editorializing and without emphasizing. They were unemphatic observers.”

“My mother, who went to the Slade, tried to teach me the rudiments of perspective when I was a little boy,” he said, “and also of lighting, of chiaroscuro. And she said the light source must be either to the right or the left. But one day I was painting in Maine, and I looked ahead, and I saw that the shadows were coming in from the right and converging with shadows from the left. I thought, ‘From which side of me is the sunlight, Mom!’ I turned ’round and saw that it was right behind my head, and therefore the shadows converged. It was quite an important moment of discovery for me, in life.”

Mr. Downes thinks he has been able to resist the received conventions of realist painting – perspective, which to him is just “a very brilliant mathematical reconstruction of the world,” chiaroscuro, building up a sense of space through color – because he was trained as an abstract painter. Ironically, it was abstraction that freed him up to see more freshly, more honestly.