Lois Dodd has made a painterly Walden Pond out of her backyard in Cushing, Maine, discovering abstract truths through loving yet unsentimental observation of the facts of nature. Images of wildflowers, female nudes at garden work, or washing on a clothesline reveal an unpretentious realist with an unfailing knack for grasping primal otherness in her natural and human surroundings.

Ms. Dodd has a miraculous touch, entirely her own, that confounds the viewer’s sense of its speed. She seems to look long and hard, yet pounces on her images like some kind of predatory insect – the operative simile for a painter obsessed with flora. She has a love of offbeat images whose motif is not entirely clear, forcing viewers to look at the familiar with a fresh eye.

There is great variety in “Summer,” the second in a two-part survey of Ms. Dodd’s recent work at Alexandre. (“Winter” was reviewed by John Goodrich in these pages last month.) Some works, like “Belfast, June” (2001), an oil sketch on masonite, show her having fun with the brush without giving in to any kind of bravura splurge. “Spider Web With Clover and Grass” (2004), in oil on linen, has an entirely different texture and temperature. The chalky, rubbed-away quality of the paint casts a veil across the screen of vision, evoking a sense of morning dew.

Ms. Dodd deals in both essences and specifics. At once meticulous and spontaneous, botanically or anatomically detailed and compositionally selective, her quirky images never seem contrived.

Talk about art that fuses abstraction and figuration, and you could be describing any number of academic painters at work today. But Ms. Dodd offers a salad, not a soup, of these contrastive views of the world.

You immediately sense that Ms Dodd works directly from nature. At the same time, however, a metaphysical delight in hidden geometries comes through, as in the propeller-like forms discovered in “Red Tulip, Head-On” (2003), not to mention a modernist’s vindication of the autonomy of formal means. The latter comes across in her uncanny ability to make each brushstroke seem individual while it still does the traditional jobs of modeling volumes and blending planes.

With her literal and metaphorical “carpentry,” she is as much a constructivist as a realist. She revels in the material support, which is as often plywood, masonite, or (though not in this show) oddball choices like roofing tiles as it is conventional linen or canvas. When she uses ply, the woodiness of the support shines through, in grain or exposed areas.

Likewise, Ms. Dodd’s paintings gravitate toward subjects that depend on sturdy, “honest” woodwork. Wheel barrows, a staircase in a half-abandoned construction site, woodpiles: Each seems like a metaphor for her own timeless, unpretentious endeavor. Even the washing on a line in “Clothesline” (2004), becomes a metaphor as much as a motif. And then there is the boxiness of her figures, which are almost like toys in their building-block stockiness. Yet have anatomical credibility: They are busy at work or play rather than passively posing.

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Ms. Dodd paints female nudes without a hint of either prurience or idealism. No one would make the same claim for Brad Kahlhamer, whose third solo exhibition at Deitch Projects in SoHo has the indicative title “Girls + Skulls.” His weltanschauung is more Guns N’ Roses than Walden Pond.

Yet Mr. Kahlhamer is a force of nature – and an artistic dynamo. He draws lovingly idealized, achingly pretty young women, usually in fishnets and skimpy dresses, sporting rifles and disporting themselves with skulls, in poses that veer between languor and raunchiness. His three “Urban Prairie Girls” series, hung in dense blocks of 10 23-inch-by-32-inch pages, are packed with scrawled lettering and frenetic sprays of ink that convey references to Native American and Wild West culture with the intensity and relentlessness of an outsider artist. His raucous, febrile meditations on sex and death achieve formal and emotional all-overness.

This show is in harmony with the persistent teenagerism of the Deitch Projects program, but Mr. Kahlhamer’s perverse mastery sets him apart. The furious, Dionysian abandon of his scrawl submits to a dissipated gestalt worthy of Cy Twombly, while miraculous moments of unexpected finesse in his ink bleeds recall Rouault’s luminous watercolors.

Mr. Kahlhamer claims personal kinship with the sitters, whom he meets (Lautrec-style) in New York bars; he is also about to publish a book of interviews with them. At the same time, they seem like stereotypical girlie-magazine models who are figments of an unappeased longings. There is a cold relentlessness in their prettiness that belies his manifest ardor. But Mr. Kahlhamer turns this seeming lack of empathy to expressive advantage, adding an element of white-trash desperation to an art about pathos and alienation.

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Descend farther downtown to TriBeCa’s DFN Gallery, and you’ll encounter echoes of Mr. Kahlhamer’s blue-collar, adolescent libido in a pair of solo shows by the realist painters Tom Birkner and John Hardy.

Mr. Hardy offers an update of Hopper, introducing that painter of modern life to oversexed billboards and cellphones. He milks these themes dry, but his humorous images have ingenuity and charm. In “I Need To See You” (2004) – as in most of the images – virtually every pedestrian jabbers away on a cellphone, while above them giant personages in the billboards (painted in a hand undifferentiated from the live figures) pick up the conversational banalities in a secondary narrative of cross-communication.

Mr. Birkner’s sharply observed, chromatically inventive, compositionally ambitious social scenes have a slow-burning sexuality that rhymes with the bluesy resignation of the depressed towns, threatening freeway encounters and proletarian amusements he depicts. In “Tailgating” (2006), he captures the sublimated, low-octane eroticism of sweating women absurdly dressed for the Mermaid Parade; and in “Engine Trouble” (2006), he depicts the earth-goddess defiance of a surly “Jersey girl” as under the hood a mechanic straddles her engine rodeo-style.

He saves his sensual painterly best, however, for the meticulously observed reflections in the metallic and glass surfaces of “‘Stang” (2006). The car window provocatively bisects the female driver’s head while the blue fender twists the surrounding buildings into exotic serpentine shapes. Car and driver unite to lure the viewer away from a desolate company town that’s lost its company.

Dodd until March 25 (41 E. 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 212-755-2828). Prices: $6,500-$42,000. Kahlhamer until April 1 (76 Grand Street at Wooster Street, 212-343-7300). Prices: $8,000-$85,000. Hardy and Birkner until April 8 (176 Franklin Street, between Greenwich and Hudson Streets, 212-334-3400). Prices for Hardy drawings: $900-$1,100. Prices for Hardy paintings: $7,500-$15,000. Prices for Birkner: $2,800-$26,000.