By JOHN GREENWALD
Sun Correspondent

Landscape painting usually is the visual equivalent of meatloaf --comfort food. Nothing exotic or pushy, just familiar, calming reassurance. UMass Lowell art professor Dan Gottsegen's paintings and pastels can soothe the eye, but they also can challenge it. Indeed, the best work in his new show at the Whistler House's Parker Gallery tests our notions of a proper landscape.

"Winter Hillside II" looks like its title: Spindly trees placed on the left third of a large canvas, surrounded by a snowy hillside. But the painting resembles a computer-pixelated photo, with its surfaces rendered in small, soft horizontal rectangles full of pastel and other muted colors. What could have been a scene of winter stillness instead becomes a better one of subtle movement, almost vibration.

 Similarly, "Autumn Woods II" goes far beyond its title. From a distance, we see rich autumn leaves mingled with green leaves not yet turned, all pulsating out of black shadows. But it’s more. Instead of the horizontal pixelations of "Winter," Gottsegen uses interlocking horizontal and vertical Lego-like shapes. What’s fascinating is not the ordinary scene, but the near abstract and decorative way he’s constructed this absorbing piece.

 Another painting, "Jacob's Dream," doesn't exactly fit the landscape theme, but it's also captivating. A painting of a large wall of hanging feathers, it emphasizes their texture and patterns, plus Gottsegen’s love of paint and the relationship of colors.

Two canvases, "Places of Here & Then" and "A Memoir: My Life to Now,"illustrate two sides of his imagination. Both feature birds painted somewhat indistinctly, more for their movement and shapes than for detail. In "Places," they're flying in a swirl of paint, as if they were caught snow squall. In "Memoir," they're flying and standing on a beach amid long-stemmed purple flowers.

 In both, Gottsegen inserts three or four separate and realistic little paintings of cloudscapes, landscapes and seascapes, which give us something oddly concrete amid the ambiguity. I'm not sure these two pictures' off-center juxtapositions work, but they make you look and think.

 Which is the best part of the show: In its range from familiar to incongruous, we see an artist who takes risks and wants the viewer to do the same.