Paintings by Joshua Pouwels, Philip Barter and Matt Barter; sculpture by Rick Beckjord, at John Edwards Market, Main Street, Ellsworth, through January.

Art galleries in unlikely places sometimes seem as if they happen by accident, a few paintings thrown together to cover up naked walls. But it’s clear that the current show in the wine cellar at John Edwards Market happened by design.

Color has come out to play on the canvases of Philip Barter, his son Matt and Joshua Pouwels, son of the market’s owner, John Pouwels. These paintings combine with the whimsical, deft sculptures of Rick Beckjord to create a lively, engaging mix that goes way beyond wall filler in the market’s downstairs gallery.

Philip Barter, simply put, is a master of color. He works the paint until it nearly dances on his canvases, in luminous layers or broad, thick strokes. His “Farmhouse, Aurora, Me.,” sticks out like a wide stem atop a giant, glistening pomegranate of a hill. In “Lupines” bold daubs of electric color jump out in front of a teal house, aubergine mountains and a salmon sky reflected in the water nearby.

Matt Barter’s palette is equally vibrant, yet he uses it to a different effect. His most intriguing pieces are two reclining nudes, juxtaposed. One is abstract to the point of looking like a giant, boxy apartment building in red and white. The other is subtle in color and shade, angular and yet entirely feminine.

Joshua Pouwels, an art teacher in Winter Harbor and Gouldsboro, takes the most interesting visual elements of eastern Maine and boils them down to their simplest forms. “Fall, Katahdin” becomes a white-capped shark’s fin sticking up from a calm sea of orange trees above a deep green swath of field or evergreens. A boat’s sails echo cliffs jutting into the ocean. A zebra-striped birch tree stands out against a black sky illuminated by a perfectly round, orange moon.

Beckjord’s sculptures are playful and varied, from a big, frolicking wooden seal in a “come hither” pose to his green plaster “Custodian of the Waves,” a man in cutoff shorts sweeping away whitecaps with a janitor’s broom. Whether his subject is a monkey or a mother, Beckjord takes a slab of granite, a plaster cast or a block of wood and brings it to life with a painstakingly steady hand, a light touch and a heavy dose of humor.

Jack Montgomery: New Work; one-of-a-kind jewelry by Lauren Fenterstock, the Hay Gallery, 594 Congress St., Portland, through Feb. 24.

If fashion magazines showed beauty through Jack Montgomery’s lens, maybe fewer women would forgo the french fries, worry about their noses being too crooked or try every new anti-aging cream that comes on the market.

In large format, square, black-and-white portraits, Montgomery shows beauty in all of its female forms – young, old, skinny, plump, ripped with muscles or lithe like a dancer, wrinkled and leathery and smooth.

Montgomery, a lawyer by trade and photographer by passion, has taken his camera to Thailand, the Dominican Republic and his own town, Freeport, Maine, for this show. It’s a big camera, on a tripod. It’s not exactly subtle, so there are no candid shots here. Instead, the camera has captured what his subjects want you to see – vulnerability, pride, confidence, attitude or innocence. In most of the portraits, the subjects are staring directly into the camera – burning their gaze into the image and giving a fleeting glimpse into the soul.

The parallels between the women transcend distance, time and ethnicity – whether the similarity lies in a furrowed brow, a sidelong glance or a graceful stance.

In “Gelsey in the Arms of Her Mother,” the young Gelsey peers up at the camera, challenging and protective. Her expression is reflected in the straight-on gaze of a Dominican girl, standing with her hands on her tiny hips, looking at the camera as if to say, “What are you doing here?”

“Diana, Freeport 2000” shares an intense, not entirely happy look with “Dominican Woman with Hat, La Romana 2000,” while “Audrey, Portland 2000” and “Ring-necked Girl, Thailand 2000” have youth and sweet innocence in common, even if they are worlds apart.

A small but impressive collection of jewelry by Lauren Fenterstock complements Montgomery’s work in its worldliness and sense of discovery.

Fenterstock fuses metal and spirit together in a glorious alchemy.

Especially bewitching is “And on the Seventh Day,” in which Fenterstock presents her own translation of the Bible’s story of Creation. In the piece, a silver globe opens to reveal on one half seven concentric circles nesting together like Russian dolls, each slice edged in a different material, such as feathers, flowers, moonstone, gold leaf. On the other half, a solid chunk of silver, she changed the biblical text “The lord saw all he did and found it good” to “I saw all I did and found it good” and engraved it around the edge.

For “Pennies,” she welded the coins together back to back, cut out their centers and attached them to a copper bracelet. All that remains around the pennies’ hollow centers are the words “In God We Trust.” In her artist statement, Fenterstock writes, “With ‘Pennies,’ I have tried to break apart the relationship between jewelry and commodity and explore the relationship between objects and meaning.”

Fenterstock dissects the relationship between objects and meaning in each piece in the show. In some pieces, such as “Each a Grain of Sand,” viewers create their own meaning. The work, a collection of round, transparent images sandwiched in glass and edged in silver, allows viewers to hold an image, a flower, a grain of sand against their own worlds.

Her collection is both small and substantial, making up in quality what the seven-piece show lacks in quantity. Anything more would be, perhaps, too much.

“Scott Moore: New Work,” by chance and private appointment, Clark House Gallery, Hammond Street, Bangor, through March 15. For a preview, visit www.clarkhousegallery.com.

Scott Moore captures Maine in the best light – whether it’s the slanted rays of a setting summer sun or cold winter light glistening off the snow and surf on Mount Desert Island.

“Light is really the central part of the work,” he said by phone. “I’m, in fact, more interested in the quality of light than the subject most of the time.”

His works evoke a sense of nostalgia, whether he paints laundry hanging out to dry or a crosswalk in Belfast, a chilly seashore or a heavy summer sun melting like butter behind the trees.

Part of the appeal is the feeling that he’s painting your hometown, no matter where you grew up. His “Crosswalk (Belfast)” could be in Bangor or Boston.

He captures the “certain feeling that’s universal to American small cities,” as he calls it.

Like Edward Hopper, Moore uses the transience of light, season, motion or lack thereof to inject emotion into a set of buildings, a piece of coastline or a grassy marsh.

His works at the Clark House are appealing, as most Maine landscapes are, but there’s more there. They’re pretty without being empty, light without being fluffy.

Art Notes

. “Moving Target,” a show of paintings by Hampden artist Temple Lee Parker, opened Wednesday at the Edythe L. Dyer Library in Hampden and will be on display through March. For information on the show, call 862-2357. To read about Parker’s work, check out the Nov. 9 issue of the Bangor Daily News or look it up in the archives at www.bangornews.com.

. Four art quilts designed by Elizabeth Busch of Glenburn were included in the Stanley Marcus Holiday Collection, a selection of unique gifts curated by Marcus, the chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus. The quilts, titled “Spring,” “Summer,” “Fall – Study” and “Winter,” are hand-painted and accented with prisma pencil and metal leaf. Of the “Seasons” series, Marcus writes, “Elizabeth Busch has chosen a very traditional subject, the seasons, for her pieces. Artists are attracted to the representation of nature that is offered through the fiber medium and many artists, including Jasper Johns, have done a series on seasons.” To view the works, visit www.guild.com/marcus.

. A painting by Bangor native Ione Currier-Janke was among 75 works selected for inclusion in the National Oil and Acrylic Painters’ Society’s Exhibit 2000. Currier-Janke now lives and paints in Yuma, Ariz.

. “American Twentieth-Century Watercolors: from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute” is on view through Feb. 4 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. If you go, make sure you set aside enough time to take it all in. For information, call 596-6457 or visit www.farnsworthmuseum.org.