Shadow and misty tones dance in intimate landscapes

Michael Porter's palette is thawing. A stay on Cape Ann in 2004 sparked the change. The British painter, whose landscapes turn a lens on the ground beneath his feet, had been making craggy, textured canvases in cool grays -- stone faces, artfully captured. A summer on the North Shore began to soften and green his work. He came back last year, and works springing from that visit are now up at the Jane Deering Gallery.

Porter has for some time been a masterful painter; now he's a joyful one. These gorgeously crafted paintings on canvas and paper dart and shift with light, shadow, and misty tones. They're landscapes, but intimate ones: The lack of a horizon line deprives us of orientation, and it's easy to just lose yourself in the dappled layers.

The texture doesn't exactly mimic that of a shoreline trail or a forest floor, but Porter deploys stippling and built-up paint, as well as reflectivity, to evoke nature's constant interplay of decay and growth.

Look at "Annisquam I." Tiny bubbles and craters of paint skitter over the surface in veils of green. Toward the bottom, Porter has misted on a breath of mauve. In one small passage, the mauve and green interlace; you can't tell which came first. Porter creates a sense of alluring, hidden spaces, then brings you back to reality with a photorealistic sprig of pale reeds, right in the center. Similarly perfect red leaves flutter here and there; they look as if he has pasted them on. These make a sharp contrast with the steamy verdure beneath, the visual equivalent of smelling salts after a swoon.

Porter paints with his canvases on the floor, masking off parts of them to build up craggy areas. He splatters the paint; it runs in rivulets or puddles. He mixes oil and acrylics and water to create a variety of effects.

The light bounces off the stippled dark paint at the top of "Coastal Path 15 April 2007" in a way that poetically echoes the dance of pale and deep greens at the bottom. That chiaroscuro frames a chocolatey mist in the middle. Again, Porter details the surface with a fragile reed, a dried leaf, a colorful moth. The "Coastal Path" series follows a progression: Slowly, the paint thins and bubbles, like oil dispersing in water. The pieces become more abstract. For Porter, it isn't just the image that mirrors nature, and its cycle of breaking down and building up; it's the process, as well.

Michael Porter: Going to Ground
At: Jane Deering Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through July 29. 917-902-4359, janedeeringgallery.com

Tufts University Art Gallery Fourth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition
At: Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave., Medford, through July 29. 617-627-3518, ase.tufts.edu/gallery/index.html

Every summer, the Tufts University Art Gallery mounts a juried exhibition of work by the locals -- artists who live in Somerville and Medford. There's no dearth of artists in the area; wall text proclaims that Somerville has the highest per capita ratio of artists in the Boston metropolitan area.

There have been some wonderful surprises in previous years' exhibitions. Last year's in particular was strong, maybe because it featured only 11 artists. This year's drabber version crowds in 23 artists, tapped by juror Rachael Arauz , an independent curator.

For all the artists in Somerville and Medford, there isn't a bottomless well of them, and it may be that this show has just run its course; it should be held every decade, not every year. A lot of the work, such as the hairy, vaguely repugnant sculptures of N. Noon Coda and Veronique Latimer's encaustic paintings littered with old snapshots, is so familiar-looking it's dull.

There is some good art, including work by old favorites such as minimalist sculptor Greg Mencoff and printmaker Jane Goldman . But even the best pieces here suffer from lack of context; the work of one artist never leads gracefully to that of another. A yard sale holds together more cohesively.

Brian Corey's absorbing black-and-white abstract drawings dance and snarl with intricate gestures: "The Motion of Intent" looks like white smoke elegantly rising against black, only the wisps tangle densely. Stained-glass artist Kate Gakenheimer bases her sophisticated works, such as "Haeckel's Yuzenzome," on vintage Japanese textiles. They shuffle neatly with patterns and lovely tones.

Painter Rachel Mello cuts portions out of her paintings to give each piece added depth. In "Girl on a Street Corner," she has cut out the silhouette of the girl, as well as windows and doors in nearby houses, and more. Mello hangs these in deep frames, inches away from the wall, and the shadows they cast give the paintings a ghostly quality.

Sarah Wentworth's tongue-in-cheek installation "The Complete History of Art (abridged)" is funny and provocative. Wentworth has installed a wall full of empty frames, wrapped bundles, empty canvases, and blocks of wood in a Mondrian-like grid. She's a prankster, tweaking the canon -- or perhaps suggesting that art is itself an empty canvas, to be read as whatever the viewer and society at large project onto it.

That's often the case, and it takes a thoughtful curator to arrange art in a way so a show gathers meaning and has an impact. Unfortunately, this show doesn't.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the Galleries column in last Thursday's Style & Arts section incorrectly stated that Rachael Arauz was a juror for the Tufts University Art Gallery's Fourth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition. Arauz was the exhibit's curator; gallery director Amy Ingrid Schlegel was the juror.)