Santa Monica

Two realist painters seem to be doing nothing more than what they appear to be doing. In an art world full of hidden messages and complex ideas, this is as refreshing as a dab of cologne.

Shirley Pettibone, a veteran of the local scene, shows paintings of flowers and nubbly boulders in summer gardens. Noted mainly for her watercolors, she now devotes about a third of the show to oils. A triptych called “Lilies of the Nile” gives a sense of delicate flowers existing over time. Her Photo-Realist style causes backgrounds to go out of focus so they look like all-over abstractions. They give a fleeting impression of being paintings teaching a quiet lesson about the way art always exists on a border between the real and the conceptual. The impression dissolves quickly when other pictures with dark backgrounds punch out into deep space. There’s no discernible program, just the pleasures of paint and the riot harmonies of gardens in bloom.

Daniel Chard is a practiced landscape painter who lives in New Jersey and shows here for the first time. His panoramic wide-horizoned views are grand in scope, miniature in scale and intimate in feeling. He may remind some viewers of another East Coast artist, Rackstraw Downes. Chard, however, likes suburbs with cozy white clapboard houses shaded by old trees like grandparents happy to bask quietly in the serene seasons that come after hard winters. Pictures move from Amish neatness to sweeping mountain views all rendered in microscopic detail that sometimes goes dry and fussy. There is no melodrama in Chard who allows nature to speak for herself but only in her most domesticated and reasonable accents. It’s a comforting view. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 21.)