Sarah McCoubrey, a mid-career landscape painter with Philadelphia roots, often goes in search of beauty in the gullies and back roads near her home in upstate New York. Inspired by Northern European landscape painting and American painting of the Hudson Valley school, she’s apparently stumbled (in these weedy landscapes) upon a completely new recipe for authentic and unsentimental landscape painting. She looks for transitional, marginal places in the magnificent landscape around her, and finds man-made marks and damage, as well as the natural process of recovery.

The exhibition, McCoubrey's second at Locks, contains 20 oil paintings on paper or panel made over the past three years, and reveals her process as a painter. Eight plein-air oil-on-paper studies document her quick comprehension of the landscape. She paints with energy, yet very neatly, combining disorderly events in the landscape with subtle harmony. Red Sign (2000, 11-1/2 inches by 12 inches), for instance, shows a tiny red diamond-shaped sign in a dreary winter landscape. Dead plants cover the ground in a delicate muddle of gold, brown and gray brushstrokes and a series of puddles reflect a milky white light. Above, murky gray-violet clouds have just a bit of pale blue sky showing through.

Another study, Signs (2000, 12 inches by 11-3/8 inches) meticulously but freely documents three signs in a deep bank of vines and brush, at the peak of summer. McCoubrey uses many of her oil studies to produce detailed oil-on-panel paintings in her studio. This process allows McCoubrey to patiently reinterpret the studies, adding and emphasizing details, sharpening the focus of her eye on the landscape. As a result, the paintings convey the experience of the artist working in the landscape, thorn-scratched and mosquito-bitten, and almost seem to exude the smell of weeds and mud, the rustling of leaves and the whirring of nearby expressways.

The humidity and hazy light of late summer can be felt in Christmas Trees (2002, 24 inches by 22 inches), which shows a huge strip of land marred by high-tension power lines. The mass of grasses, brush and trees in which the poles and lines are nestled is made of a rich density of paint, built up from many layers of thin glazes and thick bundles of marks and hatching. Tiny hairlike brushstrokes in olive green, augmented with turquoise and salmon-pink, deliciously describe a bank of distant pine trees. A sign advertising Christmas trees and a bright red bollard seem to pull the space open in the center, while power lines drape across the landscape and carve the sky into patchwork strips of blue and gray.

A group of new paintings, Snook's Pond Estates I, II, and III (all 2002, 13 inches by 11 inches) offer an even more compelling vision of the landscape. McCoubrey wanted to show the "transition of a favorite swimming pond into a residential development, and to focus on the specific details of that transition." Each painting describes, with loving attentiveness, a single newly planted tree with a spiraling white bandage around its trunk and a fluttering pink ribbon tied to a low branch. In Snook's Pond Estates III, the dark foreground, covered with scrubby plants and trash, is contrasted with glowing tree-covered hills in the distance. The landscape is filled with carefully knitted-in suggestions of human use and abuse of the land: a distant house, a sign, a bit of greenish trash, a power line. In the midst of this sadness, the bare branches of the young tree reach awkwardly upward from the earth into a sky marbled with pure blue and gray clouds tinged with pink.

The great scientist Edward O. Wilson wrote: "The natural world is everywhere disappearing before our eyes -- cut to pieces, mowed down, plowed under, gobbled up, replaced by human artifacts." He also observed, somewhat hopefully, that "untrammeled nature exists in the dirt and rotting vegetation beneath our feet." These magnificent new paintings by Sarah McCoubrey communicate her intense affection for her surroundings and allow us to take a good hard look at the lost paradise of the American landscape.