Maine’s showing off its wealth of painters again this spring. There’s so much that I’m covering three exhibits this week featuring artists at various stages of their career.

“Go Back to Keep Going: Rachel Gloria Adams” at Notch 8 (through May 6) is a midcareer survey of this artist’s work. “Things Past” at Alice Gauvin (through May 7) looks at two emerging artists in their 20s, Andrew L. Shea and Holden Willard. “Carlo Pittore: I Am Still Performing” at Sarah Bouchard in Woolwich (through May 14) is a small, breathtaking show of a painter whose in-your-face spirit insists on commanding the center of attention, even 18 years after his death.

COLOR AND PATTERN

Gustav Klimt, Sarah Morris, Yayoi Kusama … the list of artists who have used pattern and color as a basis for their work is endless. In Portland, we are graced with Rachel Gloria Adams. As a painter who is also a textile designer, she faces a unique dilemma: making paintings about painting and not just attractive patterns you might want to wear or sit on. Here, she aces it.

Adams is clearly inspired by quilt patterns, something unapologetically at the core of her work. But in “going back” to some of her early inspirations, which also include a personal iconography she has employed for years in both fields, she finds a way forward.

One notices it most in the dimensional effects these works have on our perception. Like optical art, you may find that Adams’ works do something – at times disorienting – to your eyes and your depth of vision. “Boomerang” is a fine example. The verb form of this word aptly describes what happens as you look at the painting.

Trying to figure out how Adams built up the image is confounding. It’s impossible to determine which colors and patterns she laid down first and which came after, so that our perception of what’s on top and what’s below is forever boomeranging between surface and depth. The pop colors, too, propel this perpetually repeating cycle of recede and return. It can make you dizzy.

Adams formulates compositions on a computer before starting to paint. Yet once at her canvas, she gives these computer-generated patterns life by layering on acrylics and gouaches that impart mottled and – importantly – painted texture, distinguishing them further from her textile work or any print medium. She is also a profoundly gifted colorist. Her work reminds me at times of another legendary colorist’s work: the late cut-out compositions of Matisse. In terms of color, she’s on more than a par with old Henri.

“My Girl,” though in a quieter palette, nevertheless does something similar visually. Triangular shapes fracture the surface. But in this instance, the darker purply-brown forms seem to lie on the surface, while areas of mottled blues and whites convey a feeling of light, air and, perhaps, water seen behind the darker colors. It’s like shattered glass, with its translucent crackled pattern (which fractures and partially obscures a view) alternating with transparency (the clear interstitial areas through which we see clearly).

Other paintings are more monochromatic (two “Mermaids” paintings and “Cruel Intentions”) and serve as glossaries of sorts for the iconography that repeats throughout the show: wavy lines that refer to water, stacked-bowl shapes that allude to being one of three siblings, diamond shapes with negative interiors that indicate different levels of personality and sensation, and so on. They all have tremendous graphic impact, but as you come closer, a painterliness that gives them an entirely different sense of dimension.

INNOCENCE AND ITS EDGE

There’s something both sweet and intense about “The Gilded Age,” a rather spellbinding self-portrait by Holden Willard at Alice Gauvin. It’s straightforward enough at first glance. Willard looks young and wispy-haired as he stands gazing straight at the viewer in his painting coveralls. The colors feel sunny, and the day glows with golden warmth.

But as we enter the painting, things get weird. From the house plant and view of the moon outside the window behind him, we sense we’re in an interior, yet grass and daisies carpet the ground. A picture of a bottle marked “XXX” emits some toxic red substance. A gramophone on a table strikes a bizarre note, a seemingly arbitrary artifact invented in 1877 that couldn’t possibly relate to Willard, who’s not yet even a quarter-century old. Next to it is a bottle of insulin with a syringe.

In a conversation with Willard at another show the next day, he told me he painted this after he landed in the hospital for radical weight loss that turned out to be serious diabetes. It’s the kind of work at which Willard excels. We feel his youth and innocence, particularly in a painting like the unabashedly nostalgic “Two Boys in a Canoe.” Yet we also feel that innocence evaporating even as we apprehend it, to be replaced by the sharper edges of adulthood.

The title “The Gilded Age” implies faded glory, something embalmed in memory. The creepily fulminating “XXX” potion suggests some malevolent force – tainted blood? Alcohol signaling some sort of crippling dependency or addiction? The indistinct object in his left hand could be a brush or a blade. Time is restless and pleasures fleeting in the best of Willard’s works.

His facility with paint and color is remarkably adept. The foreground of the “Two Boys in a Canoe” – depicting the surface of a lake – is awash with an incalculable array of colors and shading, palpably conveying water’s fluidity, reflective qualities, depth, incessant movement, as well as more solid objects atop it (water lily plants) and partially submerged in it (a birch branch).

Andrew L. Shea’s paintings are replete with innocence too. Yet they lack any discernible edge. I’m speaking both literally (they’re often soft focus) and psychologically. This is a risky decision that inches various works perilously close to sentimentality. There are children in almost every painting, and the more discernible their features, the nearer we veer toward saccharine sweetness.

What saves most of them – not all – are two things. First, the sheer lusciousness of paint. The pigments look almost applied straight out of the tube (I kept thinking how expensive that must be for a young artist). This is especially effective when the figures float against dark fields, such as “Owl” and “Treading,” both of which show young boys partially submerged in swimming holes. The former is more successful because the clearer features of the boys in “Treading” approach the cute precipice.

Which brings me to the second saving grace in Shea’s more successful paintings: a degree of abstraction that makes them feel mysterious. Sometimes he stops just short of abstraction, as in “Untitled (Yellow Field),” where we can barely make out two figures at lower left. Other times he goes all the way, as in “Somersault,” a painting that despite its small size (15 x 12 inches) is one of the most interesting in the show. I also liked “Winter Creek 2,” though I think it would be stronger without the figures on the lower left.

LARGER THAN LIFE

Next to Carlo Pittore’s portrait of Keith Haring are some notebook pages, written in fountain pen by the painter, about drawing. “The focus is on the ENTIRE FIGURE and you ought to keep the whole DRAWING GOING AT ONCE,” he advises. “In the first 5 seconds you should put something down on paper that indicates every part of the body, in the pose.”

Meanwhile, a video Pittore made in the 1970s runs on a loop. In quick succession, Pittore laughs maniacally (shades of Bruce Nauman’s creepy clown video), talks quietly and emotionally about the death of his friend Michael in a canoe accident, comes in close to a model’s gaping mouth as Pittore muses that it is “the entry of life’s sustenance and its major vehicle of expression and communication,” and otherwise comments on many other things.

So, I thought to myself: If someone were trying to draw Pittore’s brash, outsized personality, what series of marks would that artist make on the paper in the first five seconds? How to edit Pittore’s loud, ranging, complex identity – which, in any case, was fabricated (he was born Charles Stanley, a gay Jewish kid from Long Island) – to just a few gestures?

More appropriately, Pittore is personified by his great 1983 masterwork “La Buffonera,” an 8-by-16-foot oil of a circus scene teeming with characters. Most all of them are the boxer Steve Nusser, a figure he identified with as an artist who felt he was constantly battling with, and proving himself to, the world. Pittore appears at the middle right edge of the canvas slugging wine from a bottle.

It’s an astonishing, monumental work – both compositionally and in terms of mastery of medium. And though Nusser is the putative ringleader, it’s clear who the painting is about. Like Pittore himself, it is larger than life, full on and in your face.

The most beautiful pieces for me, however, are quieter. Three nudes of friends – two men and one woman – standing casually against a red curtain within a box Pittore renders as raw two-by-fours, are full of nuance. Like one of Pittore’s teachers, Joan Semmel, and, before her, Lucien Freud, it’s wondrous to see how many colors he employed to achieve the quality of flesh. In these, the colors seem convincingly blended (conversely, in his painting “The Immortal” – considered to be one of his most accomplished – the colors seem splotchy and unresolved and appear almost like a disease on her skin).

The proportions of the three nudes – long and narrow at 72 x 18 inches – is highly original, as is the framing within the box. And Pittore conveys a sweet intimacy with his subjects. Also interesting is “My First Baselitz (Martina),” humorously so-called because, like Baselitz, Pittore painted Martina upside down. He seems to take a page here from Philip Pearlstein, whose nudes were often positioned unusually and without sensual idealization. A suite of Nusser portraits is also exceptional.

The exhibit includes many of Pittore’s anti-war collages and drawings, hung salon-style on an inner L-shaped wall. There is strength in numbers here in terms of impact. His revulsion and scathing anger about this human folly are palpable. Like the video, the show careers from mood to mood, presenting an incredibly rich, full portrait of an artist who appeared vigorously engaged in life, yet must have been deeply vulnerable beneath the veneer of the identity he peddled in the world. Pittore could not have painted so sensitively and tenderly without that awareness of his own vulnerability, no matter how loudly he performed for his friends and his public.

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