Bizarre narratives pair with subtle landscapes at UM show

“Northern Observations,” paintings by Ed Nadeau and Nina Jerome, through Dec. 1, Department of Art Gallery, second floor, Carnegie Hall, University of Maine, Orono.

Looking at Ed Nadeau’s early paintings is like watching reruns of “Northern Exposure,” only stranger.

The characters depicted in his narratives are just as quirky – influenced by the people he met as a boy and the writings of Carolyn Chute and Joyce Carol Oates. And the situations in which they find themselves are bizarrely tragicomic.

From afar, they seem like nice, bright landscapes, but when you get closer, the canvases unfold in a macabre sequence of events – a man splays out on a snowfield beside a long-extinguished fire pit, the letters “SOS” spelled out above him in branches and brush – is he dead? How did he get here? The painting’s title, “The Short Cut,” gives an explanation that is at once funny and chilling.

In a neighboring painting, the tail end of a lobster truck sticks up from a seaside embankment. Shattered crates and the remnants of a blown-out tire litter the road as dozens of lobsters try to make a break for the water. The severity of the accident gets lost in the humor of the great escape.

Not so in “Death of a Young Man,” in which two men in plaid shirts dangle a lifeless body from the side of a bridge. The details hint at what happened – a small bloodstain on the young man’s shirt, the eerie glow of headlights from a truck, the chunks of ice in the raging river below – but we never really know.

That’s the beauty of Nadeau’s work – the characters are similar to people we’ve all met, the stories similar to “rural legends” we’ve all heard. Using his stories as a catalyst, we can imagine countless scenarios – funny, strange, ironic, bizarre.

Paired with Nadeau’s work, Nina Jerome’s paintings from Sparrow Island are a peaceful retreat. She depicts the land and sea as they change through the seasons, and, perhaps more important, she charts the changes in her own life, as well.

The triptych “Incoming Tide” is a sweeping panorama of lavender waves, atmospheric light and rugged rocks. But the nearby “Dark Musings” takes a more sinister turn. In her artist’s statement, Jerome explains that she painted it during a tough time in her life, and it’s clear that she worked through it on paper, in layers of dark, drippy paint and intense brushstrokes.

She explores the subtleties of the landscape – how the view changes on land and on a kayak, at high tide and low, looking at the sea and looking into the woods. The images are similar, but Jerome’s intimate knowledge of place and personal perspective make each view fresh.