Paquette and Edgerton at Gross McCleaf

This is one of those interesting shows: two artists who have little in common sharing the same exhibit space.

Thomas Paquette is a fairly traditional landscape painter. His work in this show consists mostly of small-format oil paintings. Everything is sunlit, with nary a man or a beast to be seen. The overall effect conveyed is one of peacefulness and calm.

I especially liked Paquette's Bachelor and Three Graces, a shadowy yet serene study of a stand of redwoods. Also quite nice was The Brilliant Moment, in which he catches a stalk bending in the breeze.

For this show, Paquette is paired with Perky Edgerton, who paints portraits and still lifes with nary a landscape in sight. Edgerton calls her exhibition "Short Stories," suggesting a narrative thrust that's not always in evidence.

Her style is more-or-less naturalistic, albeit with flourishes of abstraction. I thought her portraits worked best. Baba and two portraits of Lela display the sort of no-frills hard truthfulness found in the best Flemish art. Butter Baby, a larger piece, resembles a Buddha.

Cocktail Party, at 42 inches by 60, is one of the larger pieces, and serves as a sort of chef-d'oeuvre for the whole show. It conveys— in spades— the edginess, the slightly off-kilter quality that runs through Edgerton's work. The effect it produces on the viewer is curiously like a piece of advertising art, but it's clearly not advertising, and it certainly has higher aspirations.

This is the sort of painting that I stare at, thinking I sort of like it without being able to explain exactly why. I'm not even sure that it works, technically. But it's here, and I'm staring at it, and it certainly conjures up the impression of a cocktail party, albeit sketchily and without the aura of photographic realism that another artist might bring to it.