Critters large and small - and no need for bug spray

David Rogers's "Grasshopper" (top) is part of "Big Bugs"; Randal Thurston's "Insectum" is at the Concord Art Association.

Call me little Miss Muffett, minus the curds and whey. There I was in my trail shoes, taking a short hike through Garden in the Woods, the New England Wild Flower Society's bucolic grounds, when I caught sight of a daddy long legs. A gigantic daddy long legs. I mean huge: 10 feet high and 17 feet wide.

While I wasn't exactly frightened away, the sight startled me. Indeed, I was there to see "Big Bugs," an exhibit of sculptor David Rogers's outsized wooden insects, and I had a map in hand, guiding me from bug to bug. I'd already encountered a darling ladybug in the grass and a graceful monarch. But the towering daddy long legs, crafted from willow and red cedar, momentarily turned a sweet exhibition into a horror movie. As I approached, I saw that the bug even had a take-no-prisoners expression on its face - an expression that Rogers has no doubt copied from life.

It's another buggy summer in New England, and the New England Wild Flower Society isn't the only organization to capitalize on insects. Painter Sam Holdsworth has a hilarious and occasionally disturbing exhibit, "Greenheads," mythologizing the life cycle of those pesky critters, at the Cape Ann Museum. "Order Insecta," a group show at the Concord Art Association, celebrates all kinds of bugs, with a special emphasis on moths and butterflies.

File all three shows under the heading "summer fun." The art in "Order Insecta" is more thought out, and often more sophisticated, but on the whole these exhibits have simple expectations: They aim for the gut or the funny bone. Most of the time, they hit the mark.

"Big Bugs" works for two reasons: Rogers is a deft craftsman, and the giant critters are right at home amid the wildflowers, trees, and brackish ponds of Garden in the Woods. They're all made from wood the New York artist scavenges from fallen trees. While we might miss the color of a butterfly or the 17-foot-long dragonfly that hovers just over a lily pond near a slender young paw-paw tree, the vivid detail of the carving is enough to convey the character of each bug.

Bugs are intrinsic to the habitats of wildflowers; all of us living things are interdependent, and insects carry a lot of that responsibility on their hard little backs. Alongside each bug here, you'll find enlightening facts: The dragonfly can fly as fast as 30 miles per hour, for instance, and to catch food it folds its barbed legs into a basket while flying and snatches insects from the air.

Rogers has put together a delightful show. But watch out for the praying mantis. It looks hungry.

'Their prey is you'

The text accompanying Sam Holdsworth's small paintings in "Greenheads" has the same informative tone as the "Big Bugs" text, but Holdsworth's tale is, as my father used to say, "scienterrific."

"Their prey is you," the artist writes. "They are large, have an impossibly beautiful green head, an indestructible exoskeleton, razor sharp jaws, and perfectly tailored blood red robes."

In Holdsworth's sardonic view, most greenhead flies are garbed like cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. They enact rituals, as in the painting "The Granting of the Beaches," that look suspiciously religious. Here, a red-robed fly surrounded by white-robed ones prays before an altar with a cross on it.

Folks on the North Shore, where greenheads abound in July, will appreciate images of the flies picnicking at Crane's beach, or waiting on line for lobsters at Woodmans. Arty types will savor Holdsworth's version of a Fitz Henry Lane painting, with a greenhead as a lone oarsman arriving ashore against a luminous sky.

The violence of some of the works - in one, a trio of greenheads appears to slaughter innocent kayakers with spears - both ramps up and sometimes unintentionally unhinges the comedy. Does Holdsworth really intend to imply that Catholic cardinals are relentlessly bloodsucking?

Perhaps, but what about women? In "The Revelation of the Lifting Fog," we see a Greenhead unveiled as a nude woman, posed delectably like Manet's "Olympia." The implications - that the voracious fly is not only a high priest, but a woman, laid out in a classic art-historical pose that signifies, to contemporary audiences, the objectification of the feminine - may make your head spin. Most of these paintings are light, going for the easy laugh, and usually garnering it. My guess is Holdsworth hasn't fully thought out what he's representing. Is it great art? No. But in a book, it would make a great beach read.

Weirdly fascinating

"Order Insecta," while the most artistically high-minded of the three shows, is also the spottiest. There are some gorgeous pieces here, in particular cut-paper artist Randal Thurston's "Insectum" installation on one large gallery wall, featuring dozens of black paper bugs, intricately rendered. Some he suspends from the wall, and papers their undersides in day-glo tones to shine beneath them. The detail of variegated antennae and legs is enough to make your skin crawl, yet, like bugs themselves, it's weirdly fascinating.

Liz Awalt's paintings also shine. Awalt spent time at a butterfly refuge in Mexico, following monarchs through their life cycle. These works are much more about painting than they are about natural science, but it's an instance in which content complements form. A shimmering of brushstrokes, "Suspended Radiance" depicts a swarm of butterflies; it seems to portray the experience more than the sight of so many fluttering insects.

Watercolor is the perfect medium to capture light shining through a moth's wings, and Tamara Krendel does a haunting job in "Luna, Backlit," making her moth dark and monstrous, with lurid, green-yellow wings. But I found Anne Oldach's encaustic works, collaged with layers of butterfly-wing patterns, overreaching, and poet Jenny Lawton Grassl's nebulous, imagistic collages with text awkward - text alone, or collage alone, would have had more punch.

Still, I've got to give all these artists credit for their exacting attention to insects, critters I appreciate in theory but in practice, try to avoid.