Kate Hargrave, “The Homeschoolers,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist

That every one of the nine paintings in “Kate Hargrave: The Journal” at Moss Galleries in Portland (through Mar. 8) sold within 24 hours of the opening is itself astounding. It tells us much about Hargrave’s startling originality, but also about the art scene in Maine. Clearly, we have been hankering for something this fresh and this new, and in Hargrave, it has been justifiably discovered.

Hargrave is not one of Maine’s bold-faced names. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she labored over this suite of paintings in relative isolation, continually and simultaneously, over a period of 10 years, during which she also raised two children. This reveals a process of gradual development and accretion, something we rarely intuit in art nowadays, a lot of which is turned out within shorter cycles of exploration that rarely afforded the luxury of time to gestate and mature amid the vicissitudes of the art market.

The artist cites “Pieter Bruegel, Lucas Cranach, Remedios Varo and the sometimes-anonymous picture book illustrators who bring mystery to children’s literature,” as influences. But, though her works mostly spare the wrathful damnations of another Netherlandish master, Hieronymus Bosch, there is also an unsettlingly Boschian tremulation humming nervously beneath the surface.

Hargrave’s paintings are about innocent wonder and its loss, but also about very grown-up overwhelm. They toe a line between the eroticism of adult sexuality and the sometimes confusingly titillating eroticism between mother and child. The Belfast-based artist Annika Earley introduced me to the term “matrescence,” a neologism gaining traction in psychology that refers to the tsunami of environmental, hormonal and neurobiological changes that accompany the advent of motherhood. It is most appropriate here.

Kate Hargrave, “The Milkmaid,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist

Compositionally, Hargrave’s closest link is Bruegel, who depicted variegated narratives of harvests, folk traditions, dancing, worship, leisure activities and so on in a non-centralized way (Bosch, too, though more disturbingly); the action in those paintings unfolded all over the canvas, confounding one principal focus. But unlike the sweeping Northern Renaissance perspectives of Bruegel, Hargrave compresses all that activity into a room with a hearth, or a tightly cropped vignette such as “The Milkmaid,” where the action takes place largely in the foreground.

Kate Hargrave, “The Fisherman’s Shadow,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist

This intensifies the oddity of what we are looking at. These are not Bruegel’s secular genre scenes of peasants. There’s lustiness and chaos, children scampering everywhere, nude women dominating every scene, though many levitate in a state somewhere between pubescence and fully realized womanhood (Hargrave paints most with smooth, pillowy patches of skin where their sex should be and offers no introitus). These women’s bodies seem to be simultaneously identified with the fairy-tale world of their child hearts, the ripening of teen hormonal impulses and the carnal pleasure of mature sexuality.

We can also experience them as emotionally snagged in intricate webs of maternal responsibility, longing for a more carefree pre-maternal state, and aware of both the power childbearing gives them and the way society’s expectations of that power can suffocate desire and aspiration. Hargrave’s is a superficially fantastical, yet more subliminally discomfiting, domesticity in which her women are neither ecstatically happy nor dispassionately alienated. More than a few appear to be a little mad, and some have the hollow-eyed, sallow-skinned looks of Varo’s characters.

Kate Hargrave, “The Babysitter,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist

Many scenes also adopt the surrealist disorientation of that Spanish artist and her friend and fellow surrealist, Leonora Carrington. Pandemonium reigns, stacks of plates teeter on the verge of falling off a table, diaphanous ghosts are everywhere (some looking friendly, some forlorn, others perhaps representing stages of children’s lives that have transitioned into the past). There are confrontations breaking out, intimations of suffering and poverty, oblique references to what might be interpreted as racial inequality. Literally hundreds of enigmatic interactions transpire across these canvases — some innocent, some naughty, some sweet, some bordering on demonic, some decipherable, many inscrutable.

Kate Hargrave, “The Train Stop,” oil on birch panel. Photo courtesy of the artist

It is unimportant — if not downright impossible — to unravel these multifarious threads and plot lines. In fact, I’d be surprised if Hargrave herself could do so because the imagery and subject matter arrived to her over a long and eventful decade, the narratives becoming convoluted and subsumed in a perpetually redefining present where the details no longer mattered. We spy figures in the paintings that might have played a role at one time but whom Hargrave did not quite paint out, so that they partially emerge from under cobblestones or as shadows against a wall, no more than dim evidence that a year (or three or eight) ago they may have held relevance. Most of Hargrave’s paintings are also steeped in a hazy gloom barely illuminated by candlelight, adding further strangeness and ambiguity.

It will be interesting to see where Hargrave goes from here. Will we need to wait another decade for the next body of work? Can she sustain the densely layered richness of her practice through shorter periods of development? As her children leave the nest, will her preoccupation with characters who are half girl-half woman and half boy-half man switch to scenes that are less darkly, mysteriously enchanted? I, for one, cannot wait to see what’s next.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Kate Hargrave: The Journal”
WHERE: Elizabeth Moss Galleries, 100 Fore St., Portland
WHEN: Through Mar. 8
HOURS: Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
FOR MORE INFO: 804-0459, elizabethmossgalleries.com

IN OTHER SPACES

Greater Portland

Cove St. Arts, 71 Cove St., 808-8911, “Color Therapy” (through Mar. 15. Artists Matt Blackwell, Jon Imber, Daniel Minter, Kathi Smith, Ed Douglas, Frederick Lynch, Mauride Freedman, Jeff Bye, Nancy Morgan Barns. “Fiber & Fire” (Feb. 13-Apr. 12), textile works of On Keyong Song paired with ceramics by Jonathan Mess. “Munjoy Hill & the Portland Waterfront: 50 Years” (Feb. 13-Apr. 5), photography.

Greenhut Galleries, 146 Middle St., 772-2693, “Greenhut Artists Group Exhibit” (Feb. 6 through 28). Various artists

Moss Galleries Falmouth, 251 Route 1, 781-2620, “Jessica Gandolf: Some Assembly Required” and UV resin 3D-printed flower sculptures of “Elijah Ober: Proto-Carrot” (both Feb. 7-Apr. 5).

Space Gallery, 534-538 Congress St., 282-5600, “What Is Time? Pickwick 10-Year Anniversary Calendar’ (street window, through Feb. 23) celebrates almost 45 artists who have contributed to the print calendar from Pickwick Independent Press. And “Collective Marks: Six Years of Print Jam,” (Feb. 7-Mar. 22) includes print work from over 100 artists.

Around Rockland

Caldbeck Gallery, 12 Elm St., 594-4935, “Holiday Reimagined” (through February) continues the small-works show of 51 Caldbeck artists.

Interloc Gallery, 153 Main St., Thomaston, “Karen Gelardi: Basemap + Sidewalk” (through Feb. 22). Two installations by Portland-based artist Gelardi, with “Sidewalk” including curated work by various collaborators.

Triangle Gallery, 8 Elm St., 593-8300, “Winter Show — for the Love of Art” (Feb. 5-Mar. 22). Work by various gallery artists.

Other locations

Sidle House Gallery, 20 Bartol St. Freeport, 512-771-1149, “Impolitic: Expressions of 2024” (through Feb. 28), with work by Kenny Cole, Matt Demers, Anna Dibble, Chelsea Ellis, Kate Gerwig, Lisa Kellner, Bret Woodard, Kevin Xiques.

Fort Hall, Fort Andross Mill, 14 Maine St., 2nd floor, Brunswick (enter through Cumberland Storage entrance), Brunswick. “Long Live the River” (Feb. 16-Mar. 15), a sound-movement-painting collaboration between Aretha Aoki, Ryan MacDonald, and Meghan Brady.

Aperto Fine Art, 63 Main St., Brighton, 291-4245, “Dale Bradley New Works” (through Feb. 16), and “Jonathan Eiten” (Feb. 21-Mar. 30).

The Parsonage Gallery, 8 Elm St., Searsport, “3rd Annual Winter Exhibition” (through Mar. 2), featuring work by Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Avy Claire, Nina Jerome, Keri Kimura, Frederick Kuhn, Nathaniel Meyer, Jean Michel, Garry Mitchell, Matthew Russ, Lesia Schor, Kevin Stdeith and Sara Szwajkos.

University of Southern Maine Art Gallery, 5 College Ave., Gorham, 780-5409, “Life Forms: Grow” (through Feb. 15). Sculptural work by Jackie Brown, Leah Gauthier, Elaine K. Ng and Ashley Page.