HOLLYWOOD

In any breadth vs. depth discussion, Martha Alf is sure to land in the depth camp. Though she has covered the spectrum of art’s subjects--landscape, still life and the figure--and embraced both abstraction and representation, her work is densely woven together in one continuous fabric. Single works spin off to a life of their own, but the whole cloth never leaves the loom of Alf’s sensibility. Threads from long-past visions reappear in new works, setting up distant rhythms that echo the closeness of her parallel pencil strokes.

Alf’s perpetual reweaving process goes on in recent drawings that return to a rooftop “landscape” seen from her West Hollywood apartment--a subject that absorbed her interest 10 years ago. Three 1975 drawings provide black- and-white references for six new works that blossom in color and transform what was probably a rather bleak view into hushed beauty. As always, the classical order of her composition and impeccable execution is softened by the romance of filtered light and soft-focus presences. She transports us to a dreamy state of imagined French gardens and summer breezes blowing through sheer curtains.

Other works pursue her familiar themes of fruits and vegetables in suggestively empty spaces and indoor/outdoor views of “Objects on a Windowsill.” One of the latter, dedicated to the late Max Yavno, is a particularly striking study in contrasts: a sharply lighted and shadowed foreground against a fuzzy landscape seen through a window, and a vigorous, round apple against a shriveled pear that has fallen on its side like a wasted elderly person.

With works like this flowing off her pencil, we see that an artist sometimes accused of being obsessively repetitive is still capable of wresting the maximum psychological charge from inanimate objects and enriching her own work with fibers pulled from memory. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to May 11.)