Good things come in small packages this week. Two modestly sized galleries are presenting shows that have a warm sense of intimacy to them, which feels just right for winter. “Lauren Luloff” in Portland (through March 30) is the first show since November at the still-young Dunes in the East End. “Glimmer” (through March 17) is a four-person painting show at Sidle House Gallery in Freeport, which began as a pop-up last summer and, though still referring to itself as such, has taken a tentative step toward becoming a more permanent venue by committing to a roster of shows through 2024.

Luloff is an interesting hybrid. In various ways, her art and her medium reference so-called traditional women’s work, such as patchwork quilting, Colonial needlepoint samplers and painted silk scarves. Wielding these materials and techniques with such confidence is in itself a statement about the power of women to turn what was once considered quaint domestic handicraft into art.

But these paintings don’t really fit within the more politically confrontational use of these media by, say, Faith Ringgold or Miriam Schapiro. Rather than the sock-it-to-you punch of those artists, Luloff seems to focus more on the slower pace and breathing space afforded by her Lubec surroundings. At the same time, they might also intimate pixelated images of television and computer screens or some children’s toys and puzzles that encourage image- and pattern-making with the use of colorful plastic modular parts.

This latter allusion imparts a sense of home life and motherhood rather than the oomph of feminist artists like Ringgold and Schapiro. Yet it also stimulates a tension between relaxation and order, between domestic interiority and the intrusion of the outside world through media, and between painstaking historical craft and the vibratory freneticism of our perpetually plugged-in digital age.

Technically, they are compelling. Luloff exhibits incredible control over a liquid medium given to bleeding beyond the neat lines of her grids. But aside from this skill, the best of these works, to my mind, are those that feel representational in the midst of their apparent abstraction.

“Winter and Glowing Question” is a prime example. Near the middle, we find a house we might come across on a sampler. It’s cozy, homey and comforting in a very old-fashioned way. But creeping in from the left like a weather front are at least six different patterns that vaguely resemble a partly cloudy sky with sun, a flowery notions trim, and something blue that looks almost like a tsunami. From the bottom right, another confusion of four patterns rises up toward the little cottage. All this pattern either threatens to engulf and obscure the little structure, or they might be parting to reveal it. Either way, domestic idyll seems at the mercy of larger forces of some sort.

Works like “Compilation Painting” and “Cosmos” have clear connections to patchwork quilts. Luloff wields patterns as an abstractionist palette, mixing and pairing them like a painter might do with oils or acrylics in a purely nonobjective way.

Much more intriguing is a painting like “Bird, Watching.” The collage-like assembly of patterns creates an interior space. A blue-lilac-green floral stripe pattern looks like wallpaper. The grid to the right resembles windows, while a more straightforward stripe appears to stand in for drapes. The pixelated, primarily blue shape in the middle would seem to be the avian half of the title, and we can faintly make out an eye, a beak and the layered feathering of its back and tail.

But why is the bird inside the house rather than outside the window? And what is it watching? It doesn’t make sense, which gives the work a puzzling allure. What makes a work like this fascinating is the way Luloff walks a tightrope between abstraction and figuration to hold our attention.

This repeats in “Turtles and snake.” We can identify at least three turtles moving up from the bottom of the canvas. A green snake slithers menacingly toward them from the top left of the painting. If we had no title to explicate the image, our mind wouldn’t make the figurative connection. But with it, not only do we begin to intuit more meaning and content, but we start free-associating and perhaps notice the similarity of the turtles to stitched pre-Colombian textiles.

This kind of complexity pulls us further into the paintings, taking us beyond color, pattern and technique into worlds that are almost obscured by them. This strikes me as a fitting analogy for our “digital age.” We are overwhelmed daily by technology, information, images and other distractions. But right there, hidden in plain sight, is the meaningful stuff of memory. It’s about focusing our attention to find those things amid the clutter of daily life.

COLORING WINTER

It’s been a pretty gray, wet season, which is what makes “Glimmer” a delight. The barn in which Sidle House Gallery is located is unheated save for an intimately scaled gallery that formerly served as an office. Its diminutive square footage necessitates the salon-style exhibition of paintings by Hannah Berta, Tara Dixon, Ingrid Ellison and Caroline Sulzer. Passamaquoddy basketmaker Gabriel Frey was also supposed to be in the lineup but had to cancel at the last minute.

Though Frey’s absence is a pity, it might have been for the best, since the gallery is already jampacked (perhaps a bit too much so), requiring visitors to strain their necks to see paintings hung high on the walls. I also found the numbering system a bit confusing, as they are grouped on the handout by artist, though all works by each artist are not hung together, requiring a bit of a numbers hunt.

The standout is Rockport-based Berta, whose mix of cut-paper and painting feels fresh and new, at the same time that it threads back to a historical cut-paper technique known as scherenschnitte. This artform became popular in Germany and Switzerland in the 16th century and traveled to America in the 1700s, mostly through immigrants from those countries who settled in Pennsylvania.

Berta’s layered process begins with photographing (mostly) local flora, projecting the images onto paper and tracing areas of them, then creating luxuriant paintings of densely layered plant life. These are not necessarily naturalistic and their color palettes vary – some appear as if in shade with dappled light randomly patterning their leaves, while others are Day-Glo colors that evoke a sense of joy (“The Vibrancy of Chicory”) and cotton candy lightness (“The Lifecycle of a Rose & Grandad’s Rocking Horse”).

Then Berta cuts sheets of paper, forming lacy foliate patterns that she paints and suspends above the paintings with pins like those used in an insect specimen tray. The cut-paper partially obscures the painting underneath, mimicking the sense of layers of shadow. “Muse Garden Rugosa” has a cut-paper layer painted indigo over a painting that offers glimpses of what looks like a house with gardens beyond the cut-paper layer. The effect is equally eerie and enchanted (you could say they are a fairy’s-eye view), as well as voyeuristic, since it puts the viewer in the position of peeping through the foliage at something beyond.

Camden artist Ingrid Ellison’s paintings are all about the colors of winter. “Twelve Shades of White” is exactly that: an abstract collection of different white hues stacked on each other against a beautiful French blue. It is almost like a color study in one sense, but a lovely representation of winter mood too. A square of silvery glass glitter floats toward the upper right, halfway off the canvas, suggesting the sparkly crystalline play of sunlight on snow crystals, while near the top we have an owl wing and, along the left of the stacked white shades, numbers and lettering, perhaps referring to a specific day, or something Ellison might have been reading at the time.

This painting becomes a kind of meditation on the natural phenomena that transpire at different intervals of time throughout the days, weeks and months of winter. It is soothing and as quiet as a snowfall. Other paintings such as “Counting the Days” exude a similar ambience, while others include more figurative details, such as a murder of crows tracing a path in a sky or a fully rendered, though ghostly, owl.

Caroline Sulzer paints what surrounds her Surry home and, she says, “Once I begin painting, it acquires its own voice and I try to listen … I do my best to follow along.” This results in very diverse styles and imagery, which raises questions: If the painting is in control, what is the role of the artist? Is she simply a vehicle for an image that wants to manifest? Or can she assert stylistic preferences and a point of view that feels singular?

You could be forgiven for not immediately comprehending that these are all by the same artist. An acrylic image of a pig asleep in what looks like a meadow (“…To Sleep. To Dream…”) is a bit too cute for me, which is not to say it is a bad painting – just not my cup of tea. Conversely, “Early Maine Spring: Peach Blossoms and Forget-Me-Nots” is a slightly cubist take on its subject matter that recalls Paul Klee’s works from the 1920s. That painting and the more abstract “Peopled Forest of Memory” have a depth to them which resonated with me. They just feel as if they have more substance to them.

Curiously, this is also true of Connecticut-based Tara Dixon’s work. Stylistically, she feels a bit scattered – experimenting with an Adolph Gottlieb-like sun, drip painting and found object in “Joy Machine” then switching to loopy calligraphic lines a la Cy Twombly (“Keeping on: Black/White/Blue” and “Keeping On: Gold/Blue”) or dabbling in Abstract Expressionism in “Pink/Orange.” The results feel quite uneven.

The style that feels more uniquely hers is most evident in “Raindrops Falling,” which features concentric circular forms that appear in other paintings such as “Garden,” “Happy Memories” and “Two Stars” (none exhibited here). Atop these she paints horizontal stripes and a gold-rimmed pink area at the bottom third. This whole composition is painted on what look like pages of a ledger, which connect them to mixed media works that I feel are among her best. For me at least, this seems the direction in which she should be headed.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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