Gertrude Fiske, “Purple Orange Trees” Photos by Jay York

For a spring art outing, it’s hard to beat the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, which opened for the season May 1.

Perched dramatically over Narrow Cove, it is a perfect place to explore art both inside and outside in the exquisitely landscaped sculpture gardens. There are three temporary shows currently in the galleries: “Remember the Ladies,” “One Hand Clapping” (both through July 16) and “The Surface and Below” (through July 9).

“Ladies” focuses on women artists who painted in Ogunquit from 1900-1950. Despite its anachronistic-sounding title, it is an extremely rewarding experience. That title quotes Abigail Adams’s letter to her husband, John Adams, in which she requested that, as he drafted the Articles of Confederation, he consider changing a law that made women the property of men. The first lady was, of course, right. But she doesn’t have much to do with the arts, and this language sounds misleadingly quaint for the impressive works on display.

A title arising from the art world itself might have had greater impact: “A Passion for Line and Color” (Mary Cassatt), “What A Woman Can Do” (Artemisia Gentileschi) or “Revolutionary Acts” (from art critic Jerry Saltz’s observation that “simply being a woman artist is still a revolutionary act”).

Gertrude Fiske, “Jade Bracelet”

Any one of these would have better reflected the spirit of these women’s visions, particularly that of Gertrude Fiske. Take a good long look at her “Purple Orange Trees” (hung too high here). There is zero timidity or genteelness in either her flaming palette or her confident application of pigment. Fiske depicted the darkness of the woods in deep, inky eggplant and the sun streaming through the trees in livid oranges and yellows.

It’s remarkable that this painting was done in 1935, as it presages Wolf Kahn, who was just 8 years old at the time and wouldn’t take his first art class until three years later. Kahn’s work (which, for the record, I love) appears pretty and decorative by contrast – even what we might have once called, ahem, “feminine.”

Fiske’s “Jade Bracelet” is a genuinely beautiful still life. Yet what makes it interesting is its composition. Its spareness and the prevalence of white space impart a graphic, modernist mien. Just for good measure, she gave the Ukiyo-e print in the background an abstract expressionist makeover!

Nellie Knopf, “Untitled (New England Boats)”

Nellie A. Knopf is another standout. The saturated palette of her “Untitled (New England Boats)” is just shy of being Fauvist. It’s also refreshing to note that these women primarily took inspiration from each other rather than male artists. Of course, they were enrolled at Charles Woodbury’s Summer School of Drawing and Painting, and he was, by all accounts, an encouraging and supportive teacher. But the wall texts – unfortunately just a shade lighter than the mauve walls, which makes them hard to read – explain that, for instance, Elizabeth Jewell looked to Laura Combs and Susan Ricker Knox (her “High Noon” is terrific), as well as George Noyce. Anne Carleton’s muses were Fiske, Mabel May Woodward, Elizabeth Sawtelle and Charlotte Butler.

A quartet of Woodward’s paintings of women on the beach, all from 1925, are wonderful for many reasons: their sense of hot sunlight, their ability to convey so much with minimal gesture and a bright color palette that practically lights up the rest of the room. They make similar subject matter by American Impressionist male predecessors Maurice Prendergast and Henry Potthast seem muddy and saccharine by comparison.

Susan Ricker Knox, “High Noon”

Woodward and the other artists here were certainly “ladies.” But they were also innovating, eclipsing precedents set by their male counterparts and breaking new ground of their own. I’m with Patti Smith, who said, “As an artist, I never wanted to be fettered by gender … They don’t do that with men – nobody says Picasso, the male artist.” Or, with the Guerilla Girls, who sarcastically listed in their piece “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist” this: “Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.” Now there’s a title that would have had some bite: “Labeled Feminine.”

Feminine is also not what comes to mind when you enter the central light-filled gallery where “One Hand Clapping: Jo Sandman” is on display. Sandman studied with Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann, and it’s clear from works like “St. Cloud” (1960) that she had a natural talent for abstract expressionism. But Sandman evidently wanted to go beyond this genre and medium in her exploration of its spiritual aims.

Indeed, what is most startling about “Clapping” is the variety of the materials she chose in this pursuit: pieces of coral, burnt paper, roofing tar, inner tube rubber, insulation foil, automobile radiator hoses filled with plaster, medical X-rays. She used painting, photography, collage and sculpture all in the service of getting at the essence of the sublime and the transience of existence.

Not surprisingly, there is a preponderance of bones and skulls. In 2006, while suffering from carpal tunnel sydrome, she produced a radiograph of her wrist using the 19th-century technique of gelatin silver print. It’s part of her “Light Memory” series, a title that gets right to the core of the mystical belief in the incessant dynamism of reality. This, like any traditional photograph, becomes memory a split second after it develops on paper. Instantly following that, bone density likely grows or diminishes, pressure on the median nerve lessens or increases, numbness disappears or intensifies. Nothing remains the same from second to second. Even the light that enabled the exposure changed immediately.

Sandman often carved sand dollars and pieces of coral with faces that look like death masks. Less obviously, works she created by burning layered sheets of paper spur a flood of metaphors: extinguished life, decomposition, the King James version of Genesis 3:19 (“ashes to ashes”). One resembles a skull, another an amoeba. Yet despite their evocation of ephemerality, we are aware of the incredible precision with which Sandman burned this paper to achieve exactly these works. The same with “Untitled (Continuities),” a sculpture that looks like worms or snakes or the spirochetes from cell morphology – all forms of life that evolve and eventually die.

Lastly “The Surface and Below,” features the encaustic paintings of Boston expressionist Kahlil G. Gibran, godson and cousin of the famous mystical poet, writer and philosopher. It is aptly titled because these paintings are, in a physical as well as contemplative sense, about layers. Physically they are built up with diaphanous films of paint. Many of their titles (“Ocean Floor,” “Mussel Bed,” “Seeded Ground”) also indicate strata of earthly surface and depth. But they are also about manifestation in general, which arises out of and recedes back into some mysterious source.

The best of them, like “Bones,” work on all these levels. But others just feel a bit busy or murky and dull. A lack of compositional focus and a sameness of texture throughout don’t really give the eye anywhere to rest. Viewing one or two feels fulfilling, but 13 in one room approaches the monotonous.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com