Bold strokes color his world

Orchids and ice cream fill many of Aaron Fink's new canvases. Expect to be ravished. Fink is doing what he does best in his latest show at Alpha Gallery: He exults in his paint; he monumentalizes his subjects. At the same time, with smears and streaks and dollops, he reminds you that they're the mere fictions of a painter. They're potent evocations of desire, grander than the real thing, stirring as a dream you can't shake.

Fink is one of Boston's illustrious painters, with an international following. He's found his niche; he's a brilliant technician who makes work that not only pops off the wall, but piques just about everyone's fancy.

The colors in this show are masterful, just short of garish. In "Pistachio Dish," the green scoop is icy, topped off with lime and chartreuse, shadowed with kelly green. In some places, the ice cream is almost vaporous; you can glimpse the dark-painted canvas below. In others, it's a veritable waterfall over the scalloped edges of the stemmed crystal sundae dish sitting on a deep red table.

The twisting red trunk in "Korean Bonsai" burns against a high-octane blue ground, with cloudy puffs of foliage floating in green and yellow. Fink squeegees his paint in vertical and horizontal strips here and there, referring to the grid and reminding us that this is, indeed, a construction rather than a hallucination. The squeegee streaks reveal red beneath the blue paint, as if this image has magically coalesced over hot coals.

Good stuff. But is Fink trying anything new? A recent visit to a show of Gilbert Stuart portraits at the National Gallery inspired him to paint figures who have already been serially monumentalized: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. These icons are not the same object of sensual desire as a bowl of ice cream, but they do represent for most Americans an ideal of honor and courage that can sometimes seem lost to us.

Fink executes these portraits with the same technique he uses for flowers and desserts. Most of them seem out of place and clunky, outlined in cartoonish bold lines. One painting of Jefferson casts him in an awkward, salmon-red blush. It's impossible to get beyond the subject and see the painting.

But one depiction of Washington, in ink and oil on paper, breaks through. Here the delineations are softer, the wash and drip of pigment hold their own, playing with and eroding the familiar features rather than battling with them for attention. This is a Washington for the 21st century: recognizable, but fading, and forever changed.

Craig Stockwell follows his own formula when he paints. He always starts with circles layered as in a three-dimensional grid, like a box full of balls. Then he finds forms within, outlining groups of balls into bulbous, organic-looking forms. Stockwell has a new show at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery. With each exhibition he's had over the years, he has pushed the formula in a new, refreshing direction.

Here, he in some ways returns to his student days, studying glass at Rhode Island School of Design. He works with translucence, shaping his forms with shadows and brilliant puddles of colored light.

In "Reform #8," the ballooning chain of circles snakes over the surface in see-through washes of green. Below, paler, flatter balls link up. You can make out the fine graphite skeleton of a grid glimpsing through the bubblegum-pink ground. In one piece, Stockwell offers the blueprint, the rendering, and the realization, layered one over the other. It's as if the nuts and bolts of his formula have spontaneously erupted into something fleshly and alluring.

The painter's drawings, while simpler, are no less inviting. One graphite-on-paper piece, "12/12/06 #3," feels like a shimmer on the water, although it looks more like a morphing, twisting, dark bowling pin. Stockwell's process encourages this sense of delicious forms coalescing in a moment, and it suggests that in a moment they'll be gone.

Maine has captured the roving and rugged imagination of painter Sam Cady. His paintings at Howard Yezerski Gallery, some on canvases adhered to oddly shaped blocks of wood and some on standard rectangles, are deft if somewhat predictable evocations of that rocky landscape. Cady's skill at cutting the outlines of pine boughs from plywood may make these works curiosities, but it doesn't push them into the realm of truly inventive painting.

One piece definitively stands out. "Sunset Mirage Muscongus Bay," the only work here that Cady painted from memory, is more than 5 feet long and less than 5 inches high, and it's the sparest, most abstract piece in the show. Flat-painted, denim-blue clouds and water sandwich a long orange slab of sky, glowing at the horizon. Here, Cady has only delicately cut into the canvas, giving it a slope that elongates the scene and carving out the hint of clouds in a corner. Maine is not romanticized in "Sunset Mirage," as it is in the other canvases. It's just pared down to its slim essentials, which resonate more than all the fir trees and rock-strewn beaches in the rest of the show.