Willem de Kooning Robert Ryman Twenty-One Cranky Ways of Looking at Art Basel Miami Beach Ahmed Alsoudani Oranges and Sardines Haunch Launch Art Meets Music at the Louvre Mary Heilmann

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“I love paintings,” explains New York–based artist Maureen Gallace, “but not so much the process of making them. I love forsythia, I love a beach, I love the Merritt Parkway.”

Gallace’s love of paintings, flowers, and the seaside is unremarkable. It’s the Merritt Parkway that gives pause. For those unfamiliar with the tristate area, the Merritt Parkway is an old highway that runs from New York City through Fairfield County, Connecticut, connecting the towns along the Long Island Sound. It’s famous for its Art Deco overpasses, and it’s probably the only road to have been immortalized both in a poem by Denise Levertov and as the title of a painting by Willem de Kooning.

These days, however, most travelers are likely to take the bigger, faster Interstate 95, which runs from Miami all the way to Canada, roughly paralleling the Merritt in western Connecticut. The Merritt is a refuge for locals—or those who prefer to take the scenic route.

Gallace is a plainspoken woman, and I wouldn’t want to burden her remarks with unintended portent, but her love of scenery over speed says a lot about her attitude toward art. It’s hard now to remember how startlingly out of place her work could seem when she first began exhibiting, in 1990.

Before Karen Kilimnik, before Elizabeth Peyton, before the whole galaxy of younger painters influenced by Kilimnik and Peyton, Gallace was really the first person to put across a new genre of intimate, intimately scaled, lyrical representational painting in a New York art scene obsessed, as it’s always been, with scale, power, and impact as emblems of artistic seriousness.

And then landscape paintings? And such small ones? Seriously? But make no mistake: on first viewing, Gallace’s art may seem cozy, even bland, but there is a steely determination and an unflinching sense of focus at its core.

Seventeen years on, Gallace is still exasperated at the misunderstandings her work can generate. “I’m not an outsider artist!” she insists. “I was a student of David Salle and Jack Goldstein,” which is to say that she came into the art world about as savvy as a young artist could be. But her paintings have more to do with formal than social issues. “Mostly I’m thinking about gray and white and why green is so hard to get right,” she says. (When I ask her about the peculiar paucity of browns in her work—you’d think it would be hard to avoid in landscapes—she shudders, saying, “It makes me nervous.”)

While her paintings may not seem so different from the kind that any vacationer might do to pass the time on a weekend at the beach, they could only end up like Gallace’s if the vacationer were, say, Robert Ryman—whose work has an uncanny combination of coolness and intensity, in paintings in which every brushstroke seems both rigorously judged and quite spontaneous. That describes Gallace’s as well.

Such a balance between rigor and spontaneity, structure and impulse, is not easy to maintain. Maybe that’s why Gallace finds the process of painting so troublesome. While the paintings may seem relaxed and direct, getting them to look that way is an operation fraught with difficulty and doubt. Gallace tells me things have become even harder since 2004, when she started painting on rigid panels rather than stretched canvases. “You can’t cover anything up,” she says. “You can’t go back into the painting. It would just look messy.”

But then a lot of work goes on before she even touches the panel. She makes drawings and painted sketches on-site, along with photos shot with disposable cameras. “I look at images and the preliminary drawing forever before I use them, years sometimes,” she says.

Once she starts in on the panel, things happen quickly if they happen at all. Painting wet into wet, wiping paint off and reapplying it, she’s done by the time the surface starts to dry. In the end, she says, “I have to feel calm when I look at the painting.”

A shelf along a wall of Gallace’s Manhattan studio holds eight paintings she feels are coming along well enough to be included in her spring exhibition at Maureen Paley in London (hard on the heels of shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s 303 Gallery in 2006, and at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and Kerlin Gallery in Dublin in 2005). But a second shelf and the floor are filled with dozens she describes as “garbage that I have to hold onto”—failed attempts in which she nonetheless sees elements she can still pursue. “I just have to wait for the right mood to make that painting. Sometimes it takes a really long time.”