Kevin Muente and Phyllis Purves-Smith landscapes at Gross McCleaf

Phyllis Purves-Smith's "Being There: Connections with Nature" is a gathering of atmospheric studies of earth, sky and sea. "Eons of time are written in the rocks," Purves-Smith wrote in 2008 for an earlier show, "and the rhythm of the waves is an introductory overture."

It stands to reason, then, that Purves-Smith would create landscapes of exceptional purity. You'll search far and wide in "Being There" for any trace of a human presence upon the land.

This artist doesn't need faces; she can wring emotion from the very stones themselves. Purves-Smith takes the barren rocks and makes them sing in a series of variations. Give her a silhouetted range of trees against an inky black night sky and she'll give you a bit of Sibelius on linen.

I must confess that I prefer the artist's oil paintings to her pastels. Pastels may be the more challenging and unforgiving medium, but the resultant work always looks a bit thin to me, and the very technique calls a bit too much attention to itself. To me, oil better suits the simplicity of this artist's vision.

A vial of sand

Kevin Muente's "Traces" is also largely composed of landscape paintings, but they're a bit different. Here you find an element of theatricality that's absent from the work of Purves-Smith.

I don't mean this in a slighting or derogatory way. Artists are individuals, and their works should be too.

His show's two pièces-de-résistance are Utah Beach and Omaha Beach— massive looming landscapes, almost monochromatic, in which the weight of the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 bears down upon the viewer.

Each painting has a small niche carved into the base of the frame. In Utah Beach, a vial of golden-brown sand is suspended. In Omaha Beach, it's simply a smooth white pebble. The realization that men died to possess or to defend that sand and that pebble adds a haunting dimension to the already powerful images.

Meaningless driftwood

What works brilliantly in these two D-Day pieces is a bit less effective in Muente's Convergence, a study of a shoreline with a bit of found driftwood worked into the frame. The wood must have meant something to Muente, but it means nothing to me. There's no resonance to it. It's just there, like a prop in a play that looks interesting but is never actually used in the course of the action.

Traces includes four genre pieces. Rites depicts a hunting scene in which (I assume) a grandfather and a father are out in the field with a son or grandson. Potential for Loss depicts a man struggling to retrieve a dog from swampy ground. New Year's Day depicts a person pushing a baby stroller across a barren landscape, while Work Night— the odd man out of the group— makes a statement about life on the land by simply depicting a clearing in the woods where a wooden chair, a tree stump and an axe are bathed in an unearthly light.