George Morgan painted mostly landscape memories of the houses, streets and neighborhoods where he spent his life. There are exceptions — a hunting dog, a church choir — but the artist’s talents are most evident when he reconstructs the crazy grids of his old Augusta-area stomping grounds.

The paintings are primitive, meaning they were produced by an untrained eye and hand. Morgan, like Grandma Moses, did not have knowledge of conventional artist’s techniques for sizing and structuring objects to make them look real. Like her, he didn’t need them.

He was in love with detail, yet liberated himself at crucial moments from the demands of exactness. His perspective is a quirky, personal blend of bird’s-eye-views and profiles. His is a world made manageable, a child’s Lego city built with charm and gusto, but without regard to physics.

In one picture, a red barn is set up on end to answer the question of its spatial relationship to an adjacent house. The solution reveals Morgan’s problem-solving skills, his strength as a coper; the same strength, most likely, that let him successfully shift careers when circumstance demanded it.

Morgan’s designs are masterful, however conscious or unconscious they might have been. Left blank, parts of his canvases recede into space, while colored sections leap forward. There are bands of tension between box shapes and fluid, organic cut-outs.

In “Hallowell,” from 1963, the town has been picked up and shaken. A zooming, tilting view from space, it shows the streets converging in a kind of vacuum suction at one corner. Blocks of color look raised, glued-on. From a distance, the painting has a mesmerizing mosaic quality.

“I was kind of overwhelmed,” the painter’s grandson, Alton Morgan, said of seeing most of his grandfather’s work for the first time at the Farnsworth Art Museum. “I knew he was a detail guy, but the color amazed me. Where was he getting this color from?”

“It was a delight to watch their faces,” museum curator Susan Larsen said of the family’s reaction. “It was one of those wonderful moments in being a curator.”

Perhaps his most beautiful painting, 1963’s “Painted by Western Sun” seems a summary of life and the world. An emerald green field is crisscrossed by a road and railroad tracks. Mountains and white tops of clouds rise behind a house and two horses.

Abstracted grasses, rocks and paths wind around the mountainside, all aglow in dusky light. The composition holds together like a lovingly-sewn quilt, and the mood is peaceful, contemplative. This is the world, the painting says, or all of it that’s needed.

The Farnsworth Museum of Art is open seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Columbus Day. After Oct. 12, museum hours are: Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays 1 to 5