Venice

Idaho-based painter and teacher Rome Stuckart paints tree littered forest knolls using robust, mahogany tinged hues and an abbreviated, visionary realism. The artist studied abroad and you can see traces of academic training and European landscape savvy in the works. In Stuckart’s hands, the genre acquires the formal eccentricities of Surrealism and a twist of 20th-Century Angst.

Colors are not exactly natural, they’re exaggerated or invented, as in the rainbow veneer she gives the bark of fallen branches, or the inexplicable blue shadows that give foliage a threatening bite. The artist keeps her colors very warm, mixing them with lots of red and orange to make scenes vibrate with energy. Her arrangement of space is believable enough to pass for naturalism, but closer consideration reveals the artist’s selective imagination at work. The pictorial space she frames is narrow and somewhat claustrophobic.

In “Dry Creek Basin,” the twigs of a bare tree trunk plunked in the foreground block our entry point like weapons or sentinels, and in “Bone Yard” a tree leveled to a jagged stump by some violent force is about as cozy as a bed of glass shards. In just about every work, tangled boughs, dark pools, and boulders suggest inanimate nature about to come to life. Just beyond this barrier of seductive, yet off-putting nature we spy an intense, inviting glow. It’s almost too obvious that these aren’t literal landscapes but metaphors for life’s sublime yet rocky course. (Market Street Gallery, 48 Market St., to Jan. 6.)