Turtle Gallery features fiery landscapes

To the uninitiated, driving on the Blue Hill Peninsula can be a bit tricky. The routes are so curvy that it’s hard to take in the head-turning views without crashing. And if you don’t have a good map, you’re doomed, because all the roads look the same.

Or do they?

Jeff Loxterkamp’s paintings would convince you otherwise. The Hampden painter has turned his brush to the region’s byways and villages for a show that opens tomorrow at the Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle. The results are both familiar and striking, with bold jolts of color that shake up the otherwise realistic landscapes.

Nowhere is this more prominent than in “Along Route 175,” in which a fiery orange and acid-green sky opens up over a Sedgwick farmstead, lending an air of the surreal to the pastoral scene.

Loxterkamp’s cityscapes focus on the old-fashioned, bustling downtowns that dot the Maine coast, including Belfast’s brick storefronts and a cluster of buildings that line Stonington’s Main Street. In each, there’s a sense of time standing still, a historical record of a certain time and a certain place – in one street scene, you can make out the Ford symbol on the back of a car. In another, a portrait of Loxterkamp’s daughter in Castine, the style of dress gives away its place in time.

Yet, with all the detail, these paintings still have an abstract element to them. His colors pop off the canvas, with deep, brooding skies and wildly fluid brushstrokes. There’s a sense of motion with an underlying stillness, a feeling of change underscored by the permanence of the land and the architecture.

“I like playing with paint,” Loxterkamp said during a recent interview at the Turtle Gallery. “I try to make a painting seem as sensuous as possible, so you almost want to touch it – but you shouldn’t.”

Loxterkamp earned both his master of art and his master of fine arts in studio art from the University of Iowa, but gallery owner Elena Kubler says he hasn’t had his own style trained out of him.

“I think his approach is so unique,” Kubler said. “It’s Jeff’s language.”

In a show that coincides with Loxterkamp’s, painter Thomas Buechner’s almost photorealistic renderings of flowers and still lifes are as serene as Loxterkamp’s work is frenetic. Combined, they are a study in contrast that shows the breadth of contemporary realism.

Jeff Loxterkamp: Landscape and Thomas Buechner: Still life will be on view from Sunday, July 6, through Saturday, July 19, at the Turtle Gallery on Route 15 in Deer Isle. An opening reception will take place from 2 to 6 p.m. July 6. For information, call 348-9977 or visit www.turtlegallery.com.