Drawn together by friendship and the love of paint, these artists converse with and among themselves. As in most friendships, a recurring topic is the past. Not necessarily a shared or specific past, but individual, vernacular references to time lapsed. Andrea Voinot's and Roy Tomlinson's large scale works speak of moody moments, linking hints of place to memory.

Voinot's landscapes are ripe with underpainting that seeps from beneath textured black shrubs and trees. Road Trip feels like exactly that: a blurry, dusky snapshot of blue skies and roiling, golden hills whose horizontal brush strokes transport the lulling reverie of passing scenery. The strong silhouetted shapes in Treetops are softened by brushwork that modulates its tone and emotion, casting it beyond the pattern prettiness of art nouveau. Between, with its playful short and tall abstracted forms, suggests a reflection on transitions and change, particularly that of adolescence. Luminous yellow skies comfort the works and cautiously portend brightness.

In a more restrained palette, Tomlinson's paintings explore dualities: black and white, representation and abstraction, drawing and painting, city and nature, geometry and organic, reality and illusion, something and nothing. Shadowy, elusive allusions to buildings or trees are layered with black surface shapes that float as though extracted and abstracted from the scene beneath. The tension between flat foreground forms and textured background depth resists visual reconciliation, forcing the eye and mind to continually shift back and forth. A series of smaller panels continue the superficial painting, but here grand size, charcoal and gloaming are replaced by more articulated digital images whose details, angles and scale suggest an instant just happened.

Bruce Fletcher also mixes geometry with organic brushwork, albeit in a very different mode, Grids created by collaged 45 RPM record covers are painted over in a variety of ways. His palette color that glazes but does not obscure. Printed and handwritten words like 'reggae" and "heavy" emerge and are a throwback to the sounds and purpose that once filled these now abstracted sleeves. But their second life serves them well, too. From a distance, the formal elements are engaging and the conceptu-al and historical dimension spins depth into the work literally, physically and figuratively. In several pieces Fletcher has filled the circles, which once were windows, with paint. Other works are covered with crosses or plus signs painted across each sleeve in a way that gives them a slightly "outsider" or naive feeling. Contrastingly, 5 Yellow Bars with its bold colors and controlled composition Is very hardedge and somewhat Op-y. Fletcher tries many arrangements on a theme, and the ones with sotto voce sing the loudest.

Cheryl Meeker, too, uses the grid as a departure into the chromatic. But where Fletcher sticks to geometry, Meeker maintains a very freehand approach to brush and concept. Strong diagonals and a loud palette of aqua, yellow, orange, red and purple grounded on white give these large works distinct nervous ener-gy. Repetition and pattern suggest crude circuitry, weaving or knitting. Some of the designs feel Native American while others recall the acrylic sweaters of a 1970s childhood.

These four artists have probably watched each other's work evolve over the years, and while as a group they share a commitment to painting, they continue on definitively separate paths informed by their past and present.

-Laura Richard Janku