AT THE GALLERIES:Seeing the unseen in art

This time of year, around the solstice — the darkest time of year — we become surrounded by manifestations of our imagination, the mythologies we create to fend off or embrace all the things that winter represents: ending, renewal, death, reawakening. It’s this time of year we should most value artists, with their ability to make our imaginings visible.

William Merrill Gallery (611 S. Coast Highway) has a wonderful show until January called “Small Treasures.” Although not everything is small, it’s definitely a homage to the winter imagination.

Begin in an alcove that contains four encaustics (an ancient and fascinating method of painting with tinted wax) by Tim Yankosky.

Each is a tiny 6 x 6 inches, with a self-frame carved in the wax, of a chick dressed up in Victorian clothes. Deep under the wax there are pages from books, seemingly magnified — old typescripts, pages from dictionaries. These are little dreams, self-contained and congenial without being precious.

Similarly, Mariel Polinotto has “Teatrino V,” a vision of a rocking horse that has lost his rockers, riding instead on a striped ground of yellow, the primary colors toned down to just on the adult side of childhood.

But then walk over to “Crow and a Bug” (19 x 19, oil on linen). Here is an illustration to a fable you must write yourself. A sober fellow of a crow sits on a wire in front of a crimson sky, contemplating a tiny ant crawling away from him. As he considers his choices, a sliver of a waxing crescent moon hangs as a red suggestion in the sky. Barry Mickleburgh’s delightful canvas is also somehow shocking — what’s next?

Yankosky has three assemblages in the show that also involve birds. An assemblage is a framed box involving carefully placed and altered found objects. These “shadow boxes” usually tell some sort of story, but it’s nonlinear. They involve careful study.

“Ode to Cornell” seems to be referring to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A white bird peers from the left field, the word “psyche” written on him. Indeed, the words “psyche” and “celestial navigation” are repeated multiple times. There is a tablet, a target, a map of the parts of a bird. But what do we know about how they find their way?

This is the magic of artistic vision, seeing a reality that is just under the surface of the every day, including the reality of our dreams and nightmares. Sometimes artists represent the source, sometimes the result.

Take, for instance, “Conjuror” by Walter Harak. It’s a large bronze and copper sculpture of a fragmented figure, so abstract it’s nearly a cartoon. It leaps high in the air, legs pulled underneath, defying gravity forever as it hovers over a tall field of pipes. The figure’s partial nature seems to express its partial presence: our world, its world.

But even the less supernatural subjects in the show reveal what Wordsworth called “the glory and the dream” of innocent vision.

Three canvases by Steven Larson each express the haunting beauty of a cityscape in fog, but seen from the rooftops. Think for a moment about what you might have to do to “paint” fog. The canvases each have many careful layers of paint, the artist deciding when to make the form emerge, when to merely suggest.

Ken West’s more straightforward paintings of buildings may be deceptive. They show bright pure colors and sunlight that produces deep black shadows, softened lines — more perfection, in other words, than could ever be in “real life.”

Then there is Clare Kirkconnell’s oil on panel, “Spring on the Hill.” The 24 x 24 painting shows no hill. Instead, it is a fragment of sky, a portion of treetops, a mere portion of the whole. What Kirkconnell has focused on instead — in her vision of Spring on the hill — is the color and movement of Spring, the way green takes on an inner light. It’s a kind of portrait of a color.

If you walk over to “Adak” by Allen Cox, you’ll see another season entirely. Adak is one of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, so here is cold at its bitterest. Yet, this does not quite look like a landscape. Cox has used oil and wax on linen. There is a horizon line — white below it, white above it. But instead of the clouds having the quality of paint, the paint has the quality of cloud. Mysterious dark hash marks in the ground suggest many fence posts or something more obscure. The underpaint is yellow or green, and so the “purity” of snow takes on some- thing more haunting and lonely.

Probably no painting in the show sums up what I’m getting at quite so well as Cynthia Breusch’s “Falling Towards the Future.” There is a perfectly normal couple in a perfectly normal embrace in the upper right quadrant of the canvas. But the embrace is loose, their faces expressionless as they free fall through the canvas. That space is not quite black, not quite blue. It is just empty space.

This is an amazingly profound metaphor for the unknown known that awaits us all at the start of our adult lives, the fall into emptiness. The painting is sad and beautiful.

I noticed a thread of interesting choices in material running through the show — panel or linen over canvas, the use of wax, bronze with copper, ceramics. The colors are unusual. The forms are softened or idealized.

There are an unusual number of triptychs, that mystical number three that keeps popping up this time of year. But mostly I noticed that there is much in the world I don’t see and that I must rely on artists to see for me.