Viewers can find splendor in the grasses by painter Hartnett

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“Susan Hartnett’s Maine Grasses” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, through Aug. 29.

A sheer relief after one too many Maine seascapes, Susan Hartnett’s “Maine Grasses” is a show you will want to see if you care about art at all. The charcoal drawings at Bowdoin College are the essence of art, distilled; like poetry, they strip away the superfluous so every syllable sparkles and strikes the ear like a sound never heard before.

The subject here is grass, specifically blue-joint grass and reed canary grass, which Hartnett has studied on visits to Maine since 1991. No lines are erased; each drawing is the product of perfect concentration. Some lines continue outside the picture frame, trapping us in their undercurves, bubbles of negative space.

In places, charcoal dust is blown across the paper’s surface, delicate as pollen, creating shadows or the blur of grass in motion. The lines themselves reveal subtle changes in pressure and little shifts of the chalk’s position in the artist’s fingers. Hartnett is so present in the act of drawing, the lines read like an EKG monitor hooked to her mind and heart. The influence of Chinese landscapes and calligraphy are obvious.

In her essay about the show, Bowdoin museum curator Alison Ferris describes the drawings as portraits. There’s no other way to explain their nuanced emotion. At the sight of one arched, bent spine of grass, fat leaves hanging slackly off it, I thought at once of a tired housewife. Elsewhere in the grasses I saw a proud rooster, an abstract, Picasso-esque nude, a spider’s web lifted and puffed by a movement of air.

Hartnett’s gift is for seeing in a way most of us can’t. Ferris and her colleagues should also be credited for seeing the understated achievement of this elegant, intelligent work.

Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2-5 p.m. Sunday, free admission, 725-3275.

“Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert” at The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, through Oct. 24.

Before there were tourists on Mount Desert Island, there were artists. They came from New York, from the Hudson River school of painting, and their pictures popularized MDI when shown in 19th century New York.

Realist landscape painters of a kind, these guys never settled for a gray sky when a violet-and-fucshia one was available. They saw America through transcendental glasses, as evidenced by Frederic Church’s “Sunset,” where the orange is roughly the same shade as Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. On the same canvas, Church achieves a heightened realistic effect where the failing light glances over the foreground, pricking up and spotlighting the individual grass strands.

Church is exciting to watch — in “The Wreck,” it seems that Jesus himself might descend from a gap in the blush-colored clouds — but some of the other work in the show is second-rate. Thomas Doughty’s “Desert Rock Lighthouse” looks bland and soggy, like a bread pudding that has sat untouched too long.

We’re excited again at the end of the show by some later works. There’s the simple, lovely freshness of “A Memory of the Coast of Maine,” by George Smillie, painted at the turn of the century, and much later, Richard Estes’ “Somes Sound” has a flat and satisfying immediacy.

The Farnsworth could have stretched the show’s time line further to include more 20th century views, especially since there’s little modernism this summer in the rest of the museum. Intriguing in places, “Inventing Acadia” won’t alter the perception that Maine’s best-known museum is at times overloyal to the past.

Open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily; $9 adults, $5 students, free to age 17 and younger. 596-6457.

“Dennis Pinette: Paintings in Oil” at the Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, through July 24.

Even before they featured crackling flames and billowing smoke, Dennis Pinette’s paintings were often flush with drama. The darkness before disaster, you could have called the light in some of his landscapes. In his recent fire paintings at the Caldbeck Gallery, the threat is manifest. The waiting (the worst part) is over.

Pinette’s palette of conflagration is muted, diluted with white. No true red is visible, although there’s a high-pitched scream of orange. The apocalypse in “Burning Slash” is gorgeous, invitingly soft. In the next painting, though, smoke swirls and chokes, sucking the light out. “Fire on Barrens” is the demon twin of “Slash”‘s white-hot angel.

The show includes industrial landscapes like “River Valley #2,” where the unreal purples put us off a bit, and the more predictable and abstract “Hot Wires” paintings. Classically modern, their broken lines and scratched surfaces are angrier but less stirring than the fire pictures.

Feeling is freer in another of the “Fire on Barrens” paintings, where frothy heat moves atop splashy rocks or ash. The eye strains to make the solid ground into storm waves, moving and incandescent with gasoline rainbows.

12 Elm St., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. 594-5935.

“Peter Milton: The Jolly Corner” and “John Buck: Language of the Times” at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Orono, through Sept. 1.

It’s not necessary to read Henry James’ short story “The Jolly Corner” to appreciate Peter Milton’s etchings, but the prints will make you want a copy of the text. Without it, these are like dream fragments, half-remembered, discerned in a bubbling foam of pigment on cement-colored paper.

Fortunately, the museum provides a synopsis, which tells us that James’ main character returns to his empty family home after years abroad and considers who he might be now if he had never left.

In the etchings, a bushy-bearded head hangs from a crane, or emerges from grayness, supported by scaffolding. A cat wears rabbit ears. The symbols here are varied, like the technical effects. When a man falls from a flight of stairs, he’s a rounded, three-dimensional object in an architectural blueprint.

Strong graphic elements grow stronger as the series progresses. Bolder compositions strike the eye like movie posters. A conclusion must be near.

Downstairs, woodblock prints by John Buck are big and bold in primary colors. Buck’s unique printing process combines imprints of fine lines, drawn in wood, with broader cutouts. “Language of the Times” and “A Common Tongue” succeed visually, but in other prints there is unfortunate visual competition — and confusion — between these two levels of mark-making.

It’s clear that Buck is engaged with the printing process, but he seems to strain some for subject matter. The crazy-quilt assemblage of society’s detritus, planets and skylines, feels at times like a last-ditch injection of content.

9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, free admission, 581-3255)

Seen shorts: It’s worth a walk upstairs to Gallery 407 at 407 Main St., Rockland, to see a black-and-white photograph called “Impermanence,” by Sami Keats. The image, of a dead deer becoming one with the beach, resonates with unexpected beauty.