Artist’s paintings fluid, well-planned

There are certain things you expect in a landscape: Land, sky, horizon.

Marguerite Robichaux’s paintings of the view near her home in Eustis have all the elements. She just tweaks them a little. First off, they’re vertical. And her finished works – in oil thinned down to watercolor consistency – appear more fluid than her studies.

But the loose lines belie a complex, well-planned composition.

“We’re used to paintings being more resolved,” said Wally Mason, director of the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, where a show of Robichaux’s work opens tomorrow. “These are very fluid and they play off their fluidity, and then they stop.”

It’s common to see drips and swishes on an abstract canvas, but these seem like anomalies on a landscape canvas.

“She’s admitting to that fact and using it as an illusion,” Mason said. “It’s not a window you’re looking through as with a photograph.”

Her landscapes of the western Maine mountains show rolling hills, furrowed fields, enticing dirt roads and clear ponds in the fall and winter. One intriguing triptych shows a lake scene in three parts – the left side is foggy, the middle is clear with foliage, and the right is winter-barren.

It draws you in, slowly, like the rest of her paintings. At first glance, Robichaux’s work is a bit disconcerting. It requires the viewer to spend some time with it while her subtle mastery unfolds.

“Marguerite Robichaux: Over Yonder” opens April 2 and is on view through June 19.