Charles Yoder stands in front of a giant, inky-dark painting of the woods, looking like an artsy drill sergeant. He wears a black-and-white camouflage shirt, with black jeans, boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He is tall, almost imposing, and his hair is cropped in a grown-out buzz cut. But rather than ask the crowd of art students gathered at the University of Maine’s Carnegie gallery to drop and give him 20, he tells them what he hoped to achieve when painting “Into the Light of a Dark Black Night.”

“I’m doing a push-pull – you’re sucked in and you’re pushed out,” said Yoder, a New Yorker who painted the moonlit scene as a reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “I wanted it to be soothing but a little spooky. I like walking through the woods. I grew up in Maine and I spent a lot of time walking through the woods and it doesn’t bother me. … They’re harsh and soft at the same time.”

Yoder, 54, is an Army brat who was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and later moved to Dedham, Maine. He graduated from Brewer High School and attended the University of Maine for three years before he left to pursue a commercial art degree at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. Yoder returned to Orono last week to hang “Natural Resources,” an exhibit of woodland paintings that will be on view in Carnegie Hall through Dec. 14.

Though “Natural Resources” marks Yoder’s return to Maine, it also heralds a changing of the guard at the on-campus gallery. The University of Maine Museum of Art will move from Orono to downtown Bangor next month, and the art department plans to take over the two gallery spaces in Carnegie Hall.

“Our mission is a little bit different from what the museum’s mission is all about,” department chairman James Linehan said.

Though the staffing and budget are under review, Linehan hopes to establish a gallery-studies program. In addition to the Yoder show, the department has lined up a senior-class painting show and an exhibit of photographs by professor Alan Stubbs in the coming months. These are in keeping with the department’s mission of showing more student work, more faculty work, more exhibitions that are tied into classes, and more guest lecturers.

In conjunction with “Natural Resources,” Yoder gave a gallery talk to two art classes and a slide lecture that was open to the public. But when he approached his former professor Michael Lewis about the show, neither had planned on this kicking off a new era for Carnegie Hall.

“We didn’t think of this as the art department’s first show,” Lewis said. “I’m really happy it is, because it’s just happening in such a nice, vigorous way.”

Yoder has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, though. Like Forrest Gump, he always seems to be smack in the middle of history being made. After he left UMaine for the big city, or the big borough as the case may be, he set off in search of an internship. The museums didn’t need any help, but the Leo Castelli Gallery did, so they offered him $45 a week to do pretty much everything.

It was the early 1970s, and Castelli’s was the gallery, representing such art stars as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg.

“I was a gofer, cleaning walls, going to the post office and hanging stuff,” Yoder said. “I didn’t know who these people were … When you’re right in the middle of it, you don’t realize it.”

He was hanging out with the minimalists – the “art and language people,” and he and another artist got a huge loft in the Bowery. They were walking home one night and heard some interesting noise coming out of the legendary punk club CBGB, so they headed inside, where The Ramones were playing.

“They were just so funny I laughed,” Yoder said. “Joey Ramone fell off the stage. They wanted us to pay $3.50 at the door. I told them I’d drink it instead. … It was just what was happening. It was fun. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m in the middle of history.’ Looking back at it, it was funny as hell.”

After graduation, Yoder moved up the ladder in Castelli’s print department, eventually becoming its director. But the stress of the job started to wear on him, so he left to teach printmaking classes at the School of Visual Arts. A year later, he got a call from Rauschenberg, who needed help for his 1976 retrospective, which toured major cities across the country.

“They called me the curator,” Yoder said, laughing. “I called myself the rock ‘n’ roll art roadie.”

And things kept rocking and rolling until the European leg of the tour.

“Either I quit or got fired – It depends on who you talk to,” Yoder said. “He wanted me to go to Moscow in the winter and I told him it didn’t work for Hitler and it didn’t work for Napoleon so it wasn’t going to work for me.”

If things didn’t work out for Yoder as a painter, he could’ve been the next Jerry Seinfeld, only taller. But they did work out. Around the same time as the parting of ways with Rauschenberg, Yoder started selling his work. He would go back to work for Rauschenberg again, but ultimately, he wanted to work on his own.

“We’re on good terms still,” Yoder said. “He’s like a favorite uncle of mine.”

When he was working for the Pop artist, he was too burned out to paint, and painting has always been essential – almost sacred – to Yoder. His tree paintings, while technically perfect, are about way more than trees. They’re about color, light, spirit and a connection to nature.

“Painting is my religion,” Yoder explained. “Well, religion has too many rules. And it’s not God. It’s my touch with the other.”

People have read many things into Yoder’s paintings, and often they see things that he never intended. He works from photographs, and rarely edits what his viewfinder sees. Often, he doesn’t even look through the lens, rather he holds out the camera and lets its “eye” be the judge. The oils on view at Carnegie Hall include scenes from his parents’ back yard in Dedham, the woods behind his home on Long Island, N. Y.; his sister’s yard in southern Maine, and more far-flung locales.

“This is in Switzerland,” Yoder said, pointing to a canvas and smirking. “How exotic. It costs more.”

Though he jokes about his work, he’s serious about painting scenes from nature. He’s toyed with the idea of painting rocks or mountains, but he keeps returning to trees. He doesn’t consider himself a “tree-hugger,” and he’s not a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club, but he does have a deep respect for the environment.

“I find that kind of given to me – the beauty of rhythm and light in what I see and what I photograph,” Yoder said. “Art’s really important, but nature is the best thing. My work is what we talk about – the translation.”