Not often do discipline and play mix so thoroughly as they do on the surfaces of Julian Hatton’s paintings. In his sixth exhibition at Elizabeth Harris, Mr. Hatton continues to explore the landscape, with elements so simplified and exaggerated in hue and shape that they almost seem like pretexts for his exuberant designs. Try to picture Soutine’s tortured proportions, combined with the vivacious crispness of Matisse’s cutouts. The comparison isn’t just superficial; like them, Mr. Hatton draws vital, incisive impressions out of whimsical forms.

Despite their vivid distortions, his paintings convey the essential nature of his subjects. At a glance, the 2-footsquare canvas “Almost There” (2005-06) seems like hedonistic swirls of greens and off-whites, with dislocation, rather than cohesion, the salient goal. But after a moment, the color shifts cohere in a larger vision.

A large green disk tilts as a plane of grass beneath an overhanging branch, turning the in-between space into a charged throng of distant trunks. A bold white running diagonally up the edge of the image asserts the painting’s surface, but also marks a continuous plunge into the depths, that, along the way, places the branch firmly in the mid-distance. Patches of pinkish-tan hues move in from the opposite edge, establishing themselves palpably before and behind the grass plane, though what they allude to (a bluff? bare ground?) is unclear. What is explicit is the character of all of these forms, animated by the way they crowd or relent before other colors, as grass expanding into the distance, as a trunk lengthening into space, or as an enclosing branch.

Invention and faithful observation seem to work hand in hand in these paintings. “Yoga” (2005-06) distorts objects further still; a ribbon of tart yellow-green winds like a car’s serpentine fan belt among its ebullient forms, restraining a balloon-like purple, edging a large mauve-blue from into the depths, and momentarily pinning down a supple blue strip at the canvas’s bottom edge. This blue strip becomes a tree trunk that bursts into scarlet foliage textured with whimsical pale dots, fanning into an opposite corner. At the extreme upper edge, thin bands of orange and green ply a distant horizon. The purple and mauve-blue masses are unidentifiable, but their vibrant bulks – enhanced by curious highlights – become the crucial pacing of this luminous composition.

Sophisticated as they are pictorially, there’s a certain innocence to Mr. Hatton’s paintings. His subjects are entirely traditional, while the titles suggest poetic understatement: “Big White Pine,” “When the Beech Trees Dance,” “Channeling.” Moreover, his predilection for evocative colors and shapes would be unremarkable in itself. But his incisive drawing and sensitivity to color weights give these 15 paintings the vitality of classical counterpoint, injected with today’s freewheeling energy.

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It’s the bittersweet fate of some artists to become famous only after death. Cognizant of this, the painter Judith Rothschild (1921-93) set up a unique foundation to promote the work of under-recognized artists who died after 1976. Today, ironically, Rothschild’s renown may lie mostly – and posthumously – with her foundation.

In life, Rothschild was a dedicated and accomplished artist. One of Hans Hofmann’s star pupils, she went on to explore a variety of lines of attack: abstractions inspired by Picasso’s synthetic cubism in the 1940s, abstracted landscapes – seashores in particular – in the ’50s and ’60s, and, after 1970, abstract relief paintings with biomorphic, Matissean cutout shapes.

Knoedler’s exhibition of 21 canvases concentrates on Rothschild’s work at mid-career, when the seascape was a subject that led her back and forth through degrees of abstraction. Among the earliest works here, “Points of Light” (1957) hints at an ocean panorama with fragments of yellow, green, and deep orange energetically flitting and regrouping across a pale background; at points, the horizon and a lone sail emerge from the pulses of color.

The impressive “Untitled Landscape” (c. 1955) is at once more literalistic and more expressionistic. Here, an overlay of black lines briskly defines a vast space, with diagonals driving an off-white field into the depths. The horizon holds distantly under alternating bands of heavy gray-green clouds and spacious whites. “Weirs #2” (1957) is more staid, its angular net of lines locating masts and horizon with the obtuse delicacy of Karl Knaths, another one-time teacher.

By the 1960s, the network of outlines in Rothschild’s work had given way to bands of modulated colors – humming oranges and yellows, and deep blues – to express the deep, sonorous ocean expanse. Their relative placidness makes them less compelling. The colors tend to nurture the sense of space rather than force it; they seem to reaffirm the pleasures of natural observations without revivifying them.

These paintings brought to my mind a memorable show at PaceWildenstein some years ago that paired Rothko’s stacked-rectangle abstractions with Bonnard’s tiny seascapes. Rothschild’s abstracted seascapes have neither the daring largesse of Rothko nor the urgency of Bonnard’s condensed patches of color. But her courage shows in another way, in the pursuit of a motif that in lesser hands could easily have turned into a cliche. It takes a tough painter to tackle the congenial light of the seashore, and at Knoedler the artist does it with aplomb, and sometimes brilliance.

Hatton until April 15 (529 W. 20th Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, 212-463-9666). Prices: $5,500-$12,000. Rothschild until April 29 (19 E. 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-794-0550.) The gallery declined to disclose its prices.