Hewitt’s dancers and Wagstaff’s water worlds resonate at CAA.

This month’s Carmel Art Association Members Showcase, featuring the paintings of Jan Wagstaff and Robert Reynolds Hewitt, is a study in craft. Both artists have arrived at a subject matter that resonates expressively, and both artists study their respective subjects with a finesse that makes painting look easy.

It’s not, of course, especially when painting goes beyond mere depiction and enters a happy marriage between form and content; but these painters mine the lodes of their subjects with clarity, focus and a noteworthy élan.

Hewitt’s art centers on the human figure, specifically the dancing figure. He populates his canvases with groups of couples twirling to the unheard music of heartland and city dance hall. He studies the poses of dancers, takes liberties with anatomy, and composes in a way that mocks gravity while glorifying the singular language of a dancing couple. Facial features are caricatures; clothing is vaguely 20th century; the association is 1930s Social Realism. It’s the quintessence of stylization, not in a bad way, and he makes a separate world where he answers to no one but himself.

When Michelangelo took the High Renaissance by the hand and ushered it into the visual turbulence and tension of the Mannerist period, artists began to push the limits of form and composition. The diagonal thrust of line in composition was sacrosanct; the torque of limbs revered.

With the shift to this mannered style, the human form was no longer idealized and easily posed, but attenuated, tensely posed, with contrapposto running amok. Pictorial space was no longer measured and harmonious, but disjointed, shallow and spilling out of the foreground. Artists exaggerated the strangeness of things.

Hewitt is a modern-day Mannerist exploiting his figures’ movements and body positions as they dance. His distortions and acentral compositions, such as in “Fiddle Driven” and “Dancing: Escape from the Box,” are full of arms and legs, rhythmic spaces between twirling figures, an orchestrated joy that can barely be contained by the picture frame. The artist communicates a sense of wonder at what can and is happening. He wants you to tap your foot, too, even if the artifice of Mannerism is not your bag.

Wagstaff’s selection of paintings is part of her ongoing examination of the dynamics of wild waterways, reflections, the plants and fish found therein. More than anything learned about the subject, however, scrutiny of her favored subject reveals more about paint, the artist’s touch, and the process of discovery through painting.

At first consideration, we see views down into wild streams, with shimmering reflections interacting with plant forms barely visible through the surface jewelry and the sensuous ribbons of currents. In two typical works, “Slow Journey and “Scattered Hearts,” dark blue water sets off pale green and yellow leaf, and the fleeting sunlight, flashing across the painting like a rush of fast musical notes, suggests the caress of a tropical breeze. These are fun to imbibe.

In Wagstaff’s recent painting, the pleasure is really in the brush as it slides across the painting surface becoming leaf and stem, fish, reed and shadow. Everywhere, Wagstaff caresses forms with a knowledgeable stroke of pigment that does double duty as a definer of form and witness to discovery.

In six rugged little gems on paper, four 8-by-12-inch pieces from a “Cotillion” series and two from a “Ploof” series,” Wagstaff’s deft touch is augmented by a textured surface. The pigment-laden brush glides across the topography leaving the illusion of three-dimensional form in its wake. One pass of the brush is an orange fish’s body; a sequence of daubs becomes leaves receding into pictorial space.

One thinks of Monet’s focus on his water lily garden in Giverny, what with the repeated motifs, the investigation into light and color, the interplay of reflections and submarine subtleties and floating pads. Coming at the twilight of a life of looking, of mixing color, of designing lush surfaces, Monet’s “Water Lilies” are, like Rembrandt’s late paintings, the apotheosis of his perception. But in these late works by both masters, there is solemnity embedded in every square inch of picture plane. There is not a sense of discovery, but a sense of something profound being known.

In contrast, Wagstaff’s “Dancing on Water” body of work has the freshness of something being realized or recognized for the first time, as if her understanding of the water world that she paints is possible because of the battery of painterly marks she’s developing. The artist’s hand and eye are free, unencumbered by stylistic trappings, and, as leaves and currents and shadows and reflections take form, she doesn’t hit a false note.

Jan Wagstaff’s and Robert Reynolds Hewitt’s paintings are on display at the Carmel Art Association until March 3. 624-6176.