Painters Zach Harris and Eleanor Ray supplemented their art school educations with modern-day Grand Tours of Europe, expeditions to view Renaissance masterworks in the churches and museums of Italy and France. The affects of their encounters with the treasures of Western civilization can be seen in concurrent gallery exhibitions on the Lower East Side.

Ray’s postcard-sized pictures are perfectly suited to the narrow walls of Steven Harvey Fine Arts, a diminutive gallery on Forsyth Street. Based on her own travel photos of the architecture and frescos of Ravenna and Assisi, Rome and Florence, Ray’s artwork about artwork has unfussy yet precise brushwork.

Her oil-on-panel paintings manage to capture qualities of the original masterpieces. “Villa di Livia,” 2015, only six inches tall, conveys the expansiveness of an ancient fresco of a garden. A view through an arched museum doorway of a wall painting at Palazzo Massimo in Rome, Ray’s composition has complicated light, conveying both the sunlight of the Arcadian scene and the museum’s artificial interior illumination.

The delicate touch of Early Renaissance monk-painter Fra Angelico comes across in “San Marco Stairs,” 2014, a dreamy painting of “The Annunciation,” c. 1450, as seen above the stairs of a Florentine convent. Ray uses tentative pencil marks and soft colors to express the finesse of the Old Master.

A modern master’s sensibility is evoked in “Matisse Chapel, Vence,” 2015. Henri Matisse spent four years designing the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in the French Riviera, calling the project “the fruit of my whole working life … I consider it as my masterpiece.” In Ray’s small painting, the bleached white church exterior holds the warm light of the Mediterranean. A blue circle hangs above two long windows, an abstract arrangement of shapes that conveys Matisse’s modern interpretation of church design. Loopy cacti stems outside the church call to mind Matisse’s fondness for playful organic shapes.

A few blocks away, Zach Harris, a Los Angeles based artist, is exhibiting seven ambitious works that also reflect the influence of the Old Masters. (Full disclosure: The artist was a classmate and friend at Bard College.) After college, Harris followed the Piero della Francesca trail as outlined by art historian John Pope-Hennessy. Masterworks Harris had only known in reproduction were seen in context, lining the walls of dark churches or set in elaborate gold altarpiece frames.

Harris says he was struck by “how images were embedded in architecture, how, with framing and woodcarving, they became independent objects for devotion, holding the attention and awe of the viewer.” Upon his return, he began embedding his own paintings, albeit contemporary designs with Day-Glo colors, in elaborate frames.

In “Linen Last Judgment (V)/Saltan Sea,” 2015, a carved-out channel decorated with bright stripes zigzags across a beige ground. Faint ballpoint pen doodles cover the six-foot tall canvas creating a 21st century Last Judgment scene crowded with satyrs and cherubs, city skylines and, above it all, a “hang loose” sign. In this work, Harris reinterprets the Sistine Chapel with California surfer culture.

Flaming orange shapes dance across a gray field in “Grand Street Boogie Woogie,” 2014-2015. Drill holes and drawings of figures dot the canvas. Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Prado triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the teeming crowds here were designed to echo the hustle and bustle of Chinatown. Harris says the seven-foot tall painting is site specific, placed by the gallery window overlooking Grand Street, “a take on Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie” at the Museum of Modern Art.

“I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones,” Goethe said of his “grand tour” of Italy in the late 18th century. For centuries, a tour of the monuments of antiquity completed an artist’s education. For French, German and British painters, a special trip to study the works of Renaissance masters was a well-established rite of passage. Harris and Ray make a strong case for the nourishing effects of a present-day tour of Europe.

Eleanor Ray: Paintings, on view through December 24, 2015, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects,
208 Forsyth Street, New York, NY, 917-861-7312, www.shfap.com

Zach Harris: Must Chill, on view through December 19, 2015, Feuer/Mesler, 319 Grand Street, second floor, New York, NY, 212-989-7700

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com