“John Heliker: A Tribute” at Davis & Langdale Company features 28 paintings spanning four decades of the artist’s career. “The canvases represent the many aspects of Heliker’s life: views of the Maine coast with clam diggers and male bathers; still lifes of flowers and kitchen motifs; Spanish landscapes; a portrait of his friend, the painter Edwin Dickinson; self-portraits in the studio as well as other young artists at work in the studio.”

Heliker was a founding faculty member of the New York Studio School, and he taught in the MFA Painting Program at Parsons School of Design. His work appeared regularly in annuals and biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which granted him a solo exhibition in 1968.

“Painting was John Heliker’s lifeblood,” says Jed Perl in the catalogue essay. “My impression was that when he missed more than a couple of days in the studio he did not really feel like himself. And I doubt there was a day in his life, until his last difficult years in a nursing home, when he did not spend at least a little time with a sketchbook. So long as he was working… it was natural that the new paintings trumped the old.”

“John Heliker: A Tribute” runs through June 15 at Davis & Langdale Company, 231 East 60 Street, between 2nd and 3rd avenues, 212-838-0333, davisandlangdale.com.

Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for The New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.