Over the years, I've spent a fair part of my life looking at and contemplating art. On the one hand, you could say that I've returned, time and again, to this practice because it's enjoyable (and of course it is), but the more interesting question is—what have I gained through all this looking and thinking? What new knowledge or understanding has it given me?

I'm thinking about this because of a recent conversation I had with a member of the art faculty at SUNY New Paltz, in which she casually tossed in the word "research" to describe her recent work. Now, this isn't the first time I've heard this term used in an academic setting, but it always takes me aback somehow. When a historian or a physicist talks about doing research, it's easy to imagine what he or she means—defining a field of inquiry, using (or even inventing) a method of analysis, and then arriving at various conclusions based on primary contact with the object of study (whether through archival research or conducting experiments, etc.). This framework can sort of work as a way to describe art making, but with one crucial difference: Even when the development of some specific knowledge comes as a surprise, the historian or the physicist usually has a pretty good grasp going on of what type of answers they'll get to the questions they're asking.

Concession, Thomas Sarrantonio, oil on wood.

The same cannot be said for artists. Art has this odd way of answering questions you didn't even realize you were asking at the time, or of easing itself into your consciousness long afterward, so that even when the work is physically complete, you're never quite certain that it's told you all that it has to say. Even artists who work to realize a strongly previsualized image, something that seems planned in advance down to the smallest detail, encounter something new in working through the resistance of their materials to construct the work. Process opens a dialogue that arrives in the final product; the product (the work) then opens a dialogue with its viewers, and the whole thing continues on in a theoretically endless, open-ended fashion. Somehow this doesn't sound like your average body of "research" to me.

Thomas Sarrantonio is a painter who opens himself up to his process in this way quite clearly. As evidenced in the results of his recent "research," now on view at the Albert Shahinian Gallery in Poughkeepsie, Sarrantonio learns, and learns deeply, only through doing—through the very act of painting itself. His primary mode is plein-air landscape, that is, tromping out into the fields, setting up his easel, and responding directly to the scene before him. Through years of this dedicated practice, his painting has developed into a wonderfully rich and nuanced thing, filled with not only the light and color of the place depicted in the work, but with deep art-historical resonances (Corot, Rousseau, Cézanne), and the sheer skill demonstrated by the painterly licks of his brush across the surface.

Sarrantonio is no slavish imitator of his subject. Painting is, for him, nothing more nor less than an act of imaginative translation, a transformation of the light, the heat, the wind, and the shifting shadows that animate the living nature before him into the language of color, stroke, and representation that takes shape on his small wood panels. In recent years, he's been succeeding more and more in taking the insights gathered through these direct, responsive expeditions and expanding them onto large-scale canvases, which of necessity must be made in the studio. The abstract nature of his painterly project becomes more apparent in these works, as the gap between the artist and his source-motif (nature) grows more distant.

In the Shahinian show, he's exhibiting a large painting of a golden field. He tells me, with obvious excitement, that he "got to use every yellow and ochre in his kit" to make this one. His enthusiasm arises not only from his obvious attachment to nature, but even more so from his deep attachment to art, in its purest sense. The "knowledge" he develops in this body of work is literally and figuratively rooted in the grounding power of nature that is knowledge's true source—and it is only from this basis in nature that his abstraction gains traction.

Untitled, Chris Gonyea, charcoal on paper.

An interesting (and complete) contrast with Sarrantonio's approach can be found in the exhibition of Chris Gonyea's recent work at The Living Room in Kingston. Over the past year or two, Gonyea has explored the motif of tall stands of trees, their branches forming an intricate filigree of line and flattened form. Better known previously as an abstract painter and collagist, this new body of work has taken a number of people by surprise. (Gonyea doesn't exactly strike you as a "nature boy" at first glance.)

But the genre of landscape offers the viewer a more generous point of entry than the earlier work, while allowing him to work out many of the same ideas. The show features a number of large charcoal drawings, which reduce the issue to line and pattern, while the oil paintings introduce the added complexities of color, shot through the vertical network of tree branches like so many ribbons tying the paintings together.

Looking at the work as a coherent whole, it becomes readily apparent that Gonyea is not working in the plein-air tradition. His forest scapes derive from pure imagination, and are the product of his thoughtful abstraction, a careful working through of the basic elements of composition and design to generate the scene—just the opposite of Sarrantonio's chain of development. As a result, the body of knowledge developed in Gonyea's works is of a completely different nature (pardon the pun) than Sarrantonio's: In both cases, the truth of the work lies in its method, in the same way that the knowledge of the world we gain from a journey is made of the totality of the steps that take us through it.

The mistake would be to simply believe everything you see in a work by either of these artists. Nature, let alone our relationship(s) to it, is far too complex a phenomenon to be so easily summarized by "just a pretty picture." So go ahead, enjoy the beauty presented in the work—but push yourself to dig deeper, and to grasp something more in the engagement of the artist with his or her motif. When the work is good, you'll be rewarded with an understanding that you otherwise might never have known you were missing.