Stanley Lewis is one of the strongest living landscape painters in America. In September he was part of a two person show at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, which sold out but got little press. Some of the best landscape paintings of his career were exhibited there; a couple of the straightforward farmscapes achieve the same spatial rush experienced in a field by van Gogh.

None of those paintings are in his current show at the Bowery Gallery, and so it is not representative of his full gifts as a painter and draftsman. Even so, Mr. Lewis has pulled together another body of work comprising roughly 20 paintings, prints, pencil, and pen-and-ink drawings. This is surprising for Lewis, who will work and rework a single painting or pencil drawing for up to two years.

There are beautiful, clear ballpoint-pen drawings of his living room and kitchen in the show at Bowery, as well as one pen-and-ink drawing, “Landscape with Man and a Car” (2001), that verges on Cubist fantasy and includes a man on a bridge seemingly threatened by a car. Also on view are several spectacular small-to-medium-size easel paintings of suburban streets.

These paintings are extremely thick, syrupy, fluid, and loose – as if their green-grays, ochres, blues, and reds are all still mixing and swirling together on the canvas. They are as natural and calm as they are spatially taut, complex, and elastic. Mr. Lewis can convey light and distance reminiscent of Marquet. And he can create tension on a suburban street that recalls a day on Calvary.

“Houses in Leeds” (2004) is a gorgeous view of a white picket fence, two houses, a fire hydrant, a car, and a telephone pole. The telephone pole, standing between the houses, twists the space, wrenching it as if it were a crucifixion. The telephone lines all converge at different angles, cutting the space into pockets that strangely both jump forward and drop back. Everything spins outward from center, as forms and space are being spun or splayed outward toward the edges of the canvas. This amazing painting opens into great distance, even as it advances menacingly back toward the plane.

The greatest work in the show, however, is another of Mr. Lewis’s miraculous pencil drawings of his backyard “View From Studio Window” (2003-4). The drawing is of a deck, trees, dangling brambles, what I think is a wheelbarrow, the back end of a car, and an overturned bucket. Just more than four feet tall, like most of his large works in pencil, it has been drawn, redrawn, cut, scraped, layered, and erased so much that in places it has been worked down to nothing.

Mr. Lewis, after literally working a drawing to death, glues another sheet behind the first to patch the holes. This is done over and over until a drawing becomes six or more layers thick. The artist uses an Exacto knife to erase heavy darks. This produces a relief-like surface in which crystalline whites sparkle and pop against the smudges of gray and the dark bite of graphite.

Surprisingly, the drawing, though densely packed with detail (every branch is noted) and endlessly tortured, does not look worse for wear. A hazy, late-afternoon winter light is achieved in the drawing; and so is a cold wind, which flutters the trees, and the weight and feel of snow. The space feels clear and clean, as if it had been resurrected.

“View From Studio Window” is as obsessive as it is unpretentious. It is seemingly without pretense, plan, or artistic aspirations – as if Mr. Lewis simply drew whatever fell into view outside his window when it was too cold to go out and paint a landscape. It could almost be said that, in its faithful commitment to observation, it works against itself as a composition – as a “drawing” – yet I would bet that it is currently the best drawing hanging in Chelsea.

Until February 26 (Bowery Gallery, 530 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 646-230-6655). Prices: $600-$12,000.