John Goodrich, whose sixth oneperson show is at Bowery through Saturday, is a gifted, though humble, painter. Some 30 small watercolors and oils — landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and nudes — fill the gallery. Yet what truly captivates Mr. Goodrich, who writes art reviews for these pages, is not trees or buildings or flesh, all of which he paints with deft facility, but a white ceramic basket — an object to which he has returned again and again.

In his still lifes the basket’s woven loops gallop across his tables with Baroque fortitude, animating the blues and browns and reds of his setups. In some of these compositions, the basket provides a womb-like container in which fruit nestles. Or, as in “Plums and Peach” (2005), the basket nudges its way into the picture, as if to bully a quirky white bowl, which, holding a plum, sits at the painting’s center and offers us what looks like a view of a brain in an open skull.

Other pictures, such as “Reclining Figure in Street” (2005–06), a de Chirico-esque cityscape in which a giantess reclines on a nondescript roadway, dwarfing the architecture, feel stranger than the still lifes yet more conventional, as if the paintings were on the verge of moving toward surrealism but the artist at the last minute held back. The tension between peculiarity and the picturesque is not quite resolved.

Mr. Goodrich’s straight ahead landscapes, such as “Jetty” (2006–07) and “Hudson River, Hastings” (2006), are satisfying, and they open easily into the distance. “Hudson River” is loopy, varied in handling, and loose, reminiscent of Marin. But none of the landscapes or nudes prepares us for “Bathers” (2007), a picture whose freedom and inventiveness suggest that Mr. Goodrich is on to something new.

In “Bathers” I can sense the artist’s dependence on Cézanne, Balthus, and Matisse, and even though the picture does not completely crystallize, Mr. Goodrich has made the setting and figures his own. A white moon sits at the center of the sky, punching the blue, and a nude, as if changing from tree into woman, awakens on the far left, as two other figures dry off and rest themselves. Here, as with his engagement with the white ceramic basket, the artist has reached beyond convention, and beyond compulsory strangeness, to achieve something rich and personal.

Until February 24 (Bowery Gallery, 530 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 646-230-6655).