During August Hackett-Freeman Gallery in San Francisco presented a selection of recent still-life paintings by James Aponovich, as part of the traveling exhibition “James Aponovich: A Retrospective,” organized by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Aponovich’s paintings combine saturated, vibrant color with an almost-Platonic vocabulary of forms. In search of what he calls “true essence,” he approaches objects through a “kind of meditation.” The objects he depicts—ceramic vessels, opulent flowers and fruits, swags of patterned drapery—belong to a genre tradition that stretches from the Italian Renaissance and the Flemish Baroque to Cézanne. The fact that he sets his arrangements against a backdrop of cerulean sky and symmetrical landscape and townscape elements contributes to their historical resonance. Every successful still life is a carefully calibrated formal composition, however casual or inadvertent the arrangement appears at the first glance; even ephemeral objects, such as blossoms and foodstuffs, are translated into a more abstract realm of ideas. Aponovich explicitly evokes the rarefied air of an ideal world, rather than illustrating the process of decay, as in the Vanitas tradition, where every drooping petal carries a moral lesson.

Alan Feltus’s contemporary classicism is rooted in his love of the Italian Renaissance, but his paintings are tinged with a melancholy that seems both modern and timeless. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1943, he has lived in Italy since 1987. His subjects are figures—most often but not always a pair–in simplified interior, which is stripped down almost to the point of geometry yet retains a hold on the conventions of illusionistic space.

Combining historical artform with up-to-date technology, “Tapestries,” at the Klaudia Marr Gallery in Santa Fe, documents an exciting and ambitious new area of collaboration. The Magnolia Editions Tapestry Project offers contemporary artists opportunities to rethink a millennia-old medium.

American landscape painting provided one of the first signs that our republic had begun to move out of the shadow of European culture, science and philosophy. Some artists accompanied scientific expeditions, while others embarked on their own. Towns and cities grew along winding waterways, as plowmen broke the plains and miners cut wealth out of living rock along the continental divide.