Brushstrokes loaded with intent

Gregory Gillespie died in 2000, but he was such a prolific painter, there are still works out there that the public has not seen. The Gillespie paintings now up at Nielsen Gallery include some from his wife , Peggy's , personal collection. Others will be more familiar, but no matter. Gillespie was a masterful technician with a roving, voracious imagination and a brilliant color sense; his paintings are a joy to see.

"Self-Portrait W ith Peggy (gold background)," painted the year he died, has never been shown before. It's two portraits, side by side like snapshots, askew against a ground that has a frescoed quality. Above the portraits, Gillespie painted what looks like an imploding grid; its shape is mountainous. This small work rambles easily from Renaissance to Modernist references -- a typical Gillespie in its breadth.

Art history proved the painter's slingshot into spiritual exploration. "Confirmation Shrine" is one of many shrines he painted, with a Renaissance-style arch above a trompe-l'oeil shelf . It's a catalog of cultural and personal history, including a painted snapshot of the young Catholic Gillespie at his confirmation, another of him trekking in Southeast Asia, a variety of Hindu gods, and a large nude of Peggy benignly overseeing it all, like a goddess of love.

His eclecticism sometimes landed him, content-wise, in la-la land -- as in "Desert Saint," in which the artist, drawn diagrammatically with a third eye, looking like a Hindu god, snakes through a Southwest landscape.

The simplest works -- Gillespie's portraits -- are the most engrossing. "Portrait of an Old Man," mounted within a white wooden construction that could be another shrine, pops out from an electric-blue background. Careful chiaroscuro chisels the man's sunlit, haunting face.

Nielsen has paired Gillespie with a smaller show of abstracted seascapes by Laurel Hughes. Most are narrow vertical pieces, recalling Asian scroll paintings. They are dense but read as airy, with light pouring through them. Hughes is a deft painter, playing gesture against tone, light against texture to create something organic and elusive. But in the long run these works don't transcend the sum of their parts. After time spent among the Gillespies, in which every strand of a brush stroke carries intention, Hughes's looser, more improvisational style may swamp you.

Dorothy Simpson Krause is one of Boston's pioneers of digital art. She founded the Computer Arts Center at Massachusetts College of Art and cofounded the collaborative Digital Atelier . Her trademark is her willingness to experiment with technique and process; it seems she's always doing something new. At the same time, the content of her work grows satisfyingly sparer, leaving more and more room for a viewer's imagination.

"Viewpoint," her gorgeous new show at Judi Rotenberg Gallery, features images of the marshes and beaches near her home in Marshfield -- contemplative places for her, and fragile environments. She prints photographs on Plexiglas and mounts them over paintings, over panels coated with silver leaf, or over aluminum. There's often layering: "The Shed Out Back" sports a photo of a red shed printed on one side of the plexi; Krause has printed images from an abstract painting, looking like branches, on the reverse side. It is mounted over a white panel.

With translucent and reflective materials, it's as if the artist is layering light. Walk past "Gate to the Dunes," a photo mounted over silver leaf, and the experience of looking at it changes as shadow and light waffle over the surface. Krause imparts the idea that nothing -- the gate, the dunes, the shed -- is solid, and everything is a mere shimmer in the imagination of the universe.

Beth Urdang has packed up her gallery and moved from the little art cluster on lower Newbury Street to the little cluster between Clarendon and Dartmouth streets. Urdang was sharing space and trading off exhibition time with Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art . Goldman stayed put. Now both will run full-time galleries.

Urdang's first show in the new space features the amazing realist seascapes of Chris Armstrong and colorist Jean Feinberg's catalogs of tones on found wood. Armstrong lives in Gloucester. His "Shallows" beautifully captures the pale green infusion of sunlight into shallow water, the steely blues of reflecting light at the waves' tips, and the deep blue of the delicious inner slope of a rising comer, fringed with white.

In Feinberg's work, the flat, minimalist approach to color associated with painters such as Kenneth Noland hits the barn door. She paints geometric blocks or stripes of tone on old, weathered wood. "Reflecting Pool" features squares in shades of green and blue centered on two planks. It's a pleasing conflation of Modernist austerity with the architectural and economic austerity associated with old farms. At the same time, the wood's age and texture creates a pleasing tension against flat, pastel-toned paint. These small, subtle works may whisper, but they have plenty to say.