When the transgressions and interrogations of cutting-edge art wear thin, we can turn to the opposite: the earnest and the winsome. Two current exhibitions of landscape painting draw on quite traditional techniques and sentiments, but at their best — when they display a certain urgency of approach — they indeed transport us to surprising places.

Spreading through both of Forum’s spaces at 745 Fifth Ave., “The Contemporary Landscape” includes nearly 50 works by the gallery’s roster of artists. Many of the paintings have a romantic cast, catching in diligent detail the striking moments of nature and city life. Guillermo Muñoz Vera’s view of the Miami skyline, for instance, vividly captures the atmosphere surrounding illuminated skyscrapers at dusk. Among a number of vistas of forested hills, Tula Telfair’s “Strategies of Co-Existing Difference” (2007) features dramatically roiling clouds that, lit from behind, seem practically molten. Linden Frederick’s several landscapes radiate a plangent chill; in “The Night Before” (2007), the tiny, bright window of a trailer home gleams across a lonely, snow-blanketed field. With velvety tones, Cesar Galicia’s etching “Yankee Stadium” (1994) imparts a monumental stillness to the house that Ruth built.

By contrast, two artists pursue color at an almost fevered pitch. Layers of earthy orange fields and deep green forests climb through the deep spaces of Peter Krausz’s two vertical landscapes. Brian Rutenberg, the only abstract painter here, mixes every ingredient of passion — sizzling colors, and turgid, clotted textures — in several surprisingly sedate designs.

Two three-dimensional pieces seem to delight in their own obsessiveness. In different ways, Holly Lane and Charles Matton apply painstaking craftsmanship towards intriguingly whimsical ends. Ms. Lane encloses three tiny paintings, executed with the surreal precision of a latter-day Bosch, in a fantastically carved, altar-like wooden structure. Looking through the glass front of Mr. Matton’s 2-foot-tall box construction, one sees an elaborately reconstructed wine cellar, complete with racks of hundreds of minutely sculpted bottles.

In the most remarkable works, however, the identity of the subjects emerges not so much from diligent technique or novel concepts as from formal invention; pulses of color and line define their characters. With brisk but measured strokes, David Levine’s watercolor fixes, tangibly, the winding ribbon of a rollercoaster before a stormy sky. In the late Gregory Gillespie’s haunting painting from 1992, eddying human figures merge with the elements of cart and a landscape. The effect is unearthly, and yet worldly, too, with colors shaping an utterly convincing space.

At June Kelly Gallery, Su-Li Hung’s paintings recall the earnest gestures and luscious surfaces of the 1950s movement dubbed Abstract Impressionism. Her 13 abstracted landscapes, however, don’t feel the least dated, thanks to the vigor with which she embodies their sentiments in paint.

Ms. Hung plumbs the depths of simple formats and images. Her medium-sized canvases are almost all square, her touch energetic but never violent. In them, light and dark masses describe basic, almost primal forms — a tree’s spreading limbs, a rippled body of water — with touches of colors shimmering through many brushed and scraped layers.

Despite her feathered strokes, the artist builds forms with lyrical precision. In each of a series of four canvases, the limbs of a single, central tree become a dense mesh as they move, continuously winding and dividing, toward the canvas’s edges. Varied tints of sky show through the interstices, imparting a sense of unending growth. The air grips the tree as much as the tree divides the sky.

The titles of three other paintings confirm what one might suspect: The irregular vertical pinstripes, suggestively broken up in places by horizontal draggings of a brush, are reflections in bodies of water. More muscular is the off-balance “Little Snow on Elm Tree” (2006), in which a trunk twists diagonally above one’s point of view, its thin branches skewering the air in all directions. One far branch appears to cradle a small patch of snow, glimmering poignantly against the grayer lights of sky.

Flanking this painting are two others similar to one another in design. Both feature heavy, irregular vertical masses, formed of black strokes laid over deep vibrant blues, crossed at intervals by delicate horizontal strands. Both have a restive shimmer, explained — at least in part — by the titles. The verticals are clearly mirrored tree trunks in “River Reflections #1” (2006), but are we seeing reflections or the real thing in “Surging” (2006)? It really doesn’t matter, because the image feels substantial as either dream or experience.

Contemporary Landscape until August 31 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-355-4545);

Hung until August 3 (591 Broadway, between Prince and Houston streets, 212-226-1660).