Call it red or coral or vermilion. Whatever it was, you don’t forget a tiger that color, even after 36 years.

The artist on view that day at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Carnegie Hall? Couldn’t have told you. But I remember that tiger – luminescent, fluorescent, totally compelling.

It was my first visit to an art gallery, and in a sense, I suppose I have been looking for that tiger – and that artist – in every gallery I’ve visited ever since.

To my great excitement, Dahlov Ipcar and her animals – including my tiger – are on display at the Portland Museum of Art through Jan. 27, 2002. Nationally known, the Georgetown artist is best known for her paintings and children’s books such as “The Calico Jungle” and “My Wonderful Christmas Tree.” She both wrote and illustrated those Maine classics as well as many others.

It wasn’t until last year that I finally matched up Ipcar’s name with my memory of the red tiger, thanks to staff at the UM Museum of Art. Since I knew the date, May 1965, it took no time at all for them to check which artist was on exhibit.

Dahlov Ipcar. Of course. I had seen this Maine artist’s works in many places, but without the red tiger I hadn’t put it all together.

Fans of Ipcar’s colorful creatures – her jungle animals in intriguing hues and fanciful patterns – will be thrilled with the selection available for viewing, including the museum’s own “Blue Savanna,” a gift from the artist in 1978.

Surely it seems as though the wildebeests will run headlong into the lion, or step onto the zebras. But the triangles and trapezoids and other geometric shapes make clear that in Ipcar’s world, the jungles and plains have planes.

The same is true of “Hill Forest of Kumaon,” where the peacock and deer and rooster seem to blend into the multi-layered trees.

The effect in Ipcar’s signature style is, as the artist puts it, that of the “breaking up of space like crazy. One point in the picture leads the eye down to another section.”

On occasion the under painting shows more curved forms, while in other cases the shapes are very much geometric.

“Sometimes they make a very nice painting before I paint on top of them,” Ipcar said, tongue in cheek, speaking from her Georgetown home. She likes creating “works of art you really want to sit and look at for awhile.”

The paintings that are so obviously Ipcar’s are worth the trip, but so, too, is the hooked rug, needlepoint piece, fabric collage and other different examples of her work featured in the show, titled “Seven Decades of Creativity.”

As the artist explains, “The whole early part of my work hadn’t shown for years. I haven’t wanted to do a retrospective, so this was a trip back in time. I think it stands up well.”

Ipcar grew up in New York City, the daughter of artists William and Marguerite Zorach, whose works will be featured in a companion exhibit at the Portland museum beginning Nov. 8.

The reds and other bold colors Ipcar likes were evident not only in their works, but even in the family’s surroundings, which included floors of vermilion.

She uses the color in her painting, as well.

“Genuine vermilion holds up. It’s a marvelous color,” she explained.

The year she turned 6, her parents bought a farm in Robinhood, a part of Georgetown where the Zorach family spent the summer. Ipcar and her husband, Adolph, have lived next door to that farm for decades.

Ipcar’s talent surfaced early. At 9 she was painting jungle scenes, and by 13, she writes in the catalog for the Portland exhibit, she realized “that the beauty and feeling in a picture are the elements that matter most.”

The Zorachs sent their daughter to progressive schools, and then to Oberlin College, but never forced her into traditional art instruction.

At 21, she had her first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “a fact that never ceases to amaze me,” said Carl Little, an arts writer and former associate editor for Art in America.

Little says that like the late Bernard Langlais, “Ipcar falls into that ‘unclassifiable’ category, an artist who fits into no school of art. Her closest kin aesthetically and spiritually is probably Ashley Bryan of Little Cranberry Island, who has also worked in several different fields, including children’s books and fine art.”

Despite the early start to her career at MoMA, Ipcar chose another path, as Little puts it. “She has pursued her singular vision of the world and its creatures outside the art world of New York.”

She and Adolph raised sons Bob and Charlie on the farm in Maine, an upbringing she believes made up for the fact that they didn’t have the same “progressive” education that she had in New York.

“I never had trouble with my kids,” she said. “I have some nice boys.”

Dahlov Ipcar fans would agree. Charlie and Bob Ipcar, between them, have allowed the museum to exhibit 21 of their mother’s paintings from their personal collections.

They include Bob Ipcar’s “Two Fisherman,” the 1941 painting of him fishing with his father; and Charlie Ipcar’s “Charlie in High Chair” from 1944 and “Charlie at Desk” from 1946.

Ipcar herself lent the show her 1944 painting of her father, William Zorach, and another of her mother, Marguerite, not painted until 1999.

In that second oil, not undertaken until after her mother had died, Ipcar points out, her mother is working on a piece of embroidery – an item that will be part of the upcoming Zorach exhibit.

“It’s all sort of nice,” Ipcar remarks. “I had never wanted to show with my parents, but you have to acknowledge your part of your family tradition.”

It is a treat to see Ipcar’s “people” paintings in the current show, especially the early pieces.

“I love the early work,” commented Jessica Nicoll, curator at the Portland Museum of Art. “It was a revelation to me, and it has not been seen. The ‘Cream Separator’ was extraordinary.”

So, too, is “Ice Harvest,” the 1938 painting on loan from L.L. Bean. The work shows Ipcar’s aptitude not only for people and animals, but for landscape.

For Nicoll, it has been “a real privilege” to work with the artist. In addition, she pointed out, “Dahlov Ipcar had the skills to write the essay for the catalog. That was a particularly important contribution.”

Indeed. An appreciation of Ipcar’s art is only deepened by reading her account of her growing up with brother Tessim, her marriage and the birth of her sons, her admiration for painters such as Diego Rivera and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, her love of her corner of Maine.

“Everything about farming was beautiful in my eyes,” she wrote.

Ipcar began doing illustrations for children’s books in 1945 – first a book by Margaret Wise Brown, later more than 30 she wrote herself.

When Ipcar gave a talk one recent weekend in connection with the Portland exhibit, “people showed up with arms loaded with her illustrated books,” Nicoll recalled, marveling, too, at “how many people have come to know and love her books through the public library.”

Most of the books are out of print, but Down East Books in Camden has reissued “My Wonderful Christmas Tree.” Black bears, snowy owls, evening grosbeaks, chickadees and other wildlife inhabit the tree in the little story with its rhythms and numbers.

Ipcar likes having her work accessible to the public, especially children.

“I wish more of my books would come back into print,” she said.

At nearly 84, Ipcar continues to paint. Several of her recent works are on display through Nov. 24 at Frost Gully Gallery, the Freeport gallery, which regularly sells her paintings.

The artist has produced nine pieces this year. The bright colors are still evident, and the style, if anything, is “more light and playful than usual. I don’t know why,” she said,

Ipcar is also known for public murals such as the one she did for Mid-Coast Hospital in Brunswick. Other facilities displaying her murals include Patten Free Library in Bath and Narragansett School in Gorham.

“It’s very nice having it where a lot of people can see it and it can have an influence on them,” Ipcar said about her art.

Her works are in the permanent collections of Colby College, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum. Ipcar’s many awards include the Deborah Morton Award from Westbrook College, a Living Legacy Award from the Central Maine Agency on Aging, the Maine State Award from the Maine Arts Commission and honorary degrees from the University of Maine, Colby College and Bates College.

Museums collect not only Ipcar’s paintings, but soft sculptures such as those included in the Portland exhibit.

The sculptures, including “St. George and the Dragon,” add “snap” to the exhibit and help pull together the various elements, according to Nicoll.

Ipcar says she has gone through at least four “major” changes in style over the years, but the one most familiar to viewers of her art had its roots in the 1960 book, “The Calico Jungle.”

From that point, the patterned fabrics she had admired in old quilts and used to craft stuffed animals for her children became not just background or accent but the stuff of her creatures, wild or domestic.

Diamond patterns on a snake, sure, but on a lion? How about triangles on a giraffe? A range of blues on a wildebeest? Stripes going every which way on zebras?

They’re all in “Harlequin Jungle,” the 1972 oil that Nicoll calls “a monumental work.”

Ipcar herself acknowledges the painting’s importance, not only for its place in her range of work but in terms of her continuing art.

“I still keep this painting by me to keep me on the right track,” she wrote in the catalog. “I feel I do not want to be either more abstract or more realistic than this; and, when I find myself veering in either direction, this painting will always pull me back.”

Ipcar is equally talented in other media. “Tiger and Leopard” is a 36-inch-by-60-inch hooked rug from 1974, while “Garden of Eden” is a fabric collage from 1961, the period when patterns were growing in importance in her work. Also on display is “Golden Jungle,” a needlepoint.

For me, the star of the show is still the painting with the red tiger, “In the Forests of the Night.”

The inspiration, of course, was poet-artist William Blake, who so long ago penned, “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright, In the forests of the night …”

This magnificent painting is privately owned by someone who lives in Maine. If I knew who it was, I wouldn’t tell you. But I certainly hope that on occasion the owners will graciously allow it to be put on display again.

Then, maybe another 13-year-old will visit her first art gallery and meet a red tiger.

“Dahlov Ipcar: Seven Decades of Creativity” will be on display through Jan. 27 at Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Free admission 5-9 p.m. Fridays. The museum gift shop has both the show catalog and the Maine Masters Project video: “Dahlov Ipcar: Maine Master,” produced by the Union of Maine Visual Artists. For information on the museum show, call 773-ARTS or (800) 639-4067, or check www.portlandmuseum.org.