If the students funneling past Johnson Memorial Building every day on their way to lunch were to venture inside, they would find a glass-doored, parquet-floored gallery. Often used to display student artwork, the gallery occasionally showcases the work of professors in the Studio Art Department. This week it features the art of Jane Fine, this year's artist-in-residence, who is visiting from New York City. Fine's paintings and drawings are a flavorful paradox of candy-colored, pleasantly surreal compositions, part strategy, part improvisation, a blend of paint drips and doodles, all in scrupulous detail.

Fine gets to some of her subject matter in the stirrings of personal upheavals, one being the start of the war in Iraq. While not explicitly political commentary, her warscapes of tanks and towers find a way to display the futility of warfare using an optimistic palette of lime greens, pinks, baby blues and radiating orange.

Fine speaks about the transitions of her career as though she has arrived through a combination of formal choices and serendipity: she receives a "fortuitous" mailing from Golden Artist Colors, Inc. just as she is trying to drip paint in a new way; a friend spots birch board in the studio and suggests that Fine paint directly on the wood rather than covering it with canvas; she has the "good fortune" of having Philip Guston (a big artistic influence for Fine) as a visiting professor. She is pushed on to new experiments and more happy coincidences.

Fine talks about her struggles, describing periods of frustration during which most of what she produced ended up in the garbage. Not lacking self-possession, she deems her artistic career without start or endpoint, with no style or motivation ever completely leaving her work. Dripping paint began, for example, as liberation from the traditional paintbrush, yet Fine eventually missed it and returned to brushstrokes in some of the paintings on display in Johnson.

Like the action painters of Philip Guston's heyday, Fine juggles control and happenstance, using painting and drawing as two kinds of improvisation. There are planned parts of the composition; there is paint dripping and indulgent doodling (which Fine sees as a motif from junior high, but which she no longer resists). The underlying basis of Fine's painting is this dichotomy, whether between chance and control, male and female, liquid and solid, or humor and violence.

In Fine's work there is at once a creation and denial of illusion, inspired by the process of painting itself. Before painting, Fine often uses off-white masking tape to block out portions of the composition; later, she may paint illusory masking tape back into the picture, which is convincing even from only inches away.

It's a curious distinction that Fine makes between painting and painting paint; some shapes on the canvas are physical drips of paint, others have instead been painted to look like drips of paint. It also becomes impossible to distinguish which came first, the paint or the marker. The process is, as Fine says, "a little sneaky."

The most compelling works in the show are the collaborative drawings Fine has done with fellow artist and husband James Esber. These works are mixed media, with colored inks, colored pencil, graphite, acrylic paint and marker. They were made through a series of exchanges between the two artists, who, with side-by-side studios, could easily exchange drawings, usually keeping one or two of the other's beginnings tacked to his or her wall. These drawings feel complete, resplendent in their colorful combination of media.

Fine begins her work with abstract shapes that develop into more suggestive forms after layers of paint and black marker lines. Esber, on the other hand, works in the reverse, beginning with a direct source, like a Norman Rockwell print or the Statue of Liberty, then melting it into a crazy quilt of pattern and color until it is no longer recognizable.

As he explains, "Jane and I might conceptualize perspective differently," with a triangular white space at the bottom of one drawing appearing as "a rising mound to me, yet as receding space to Jane." These collaborations are signed "J. Fiber," a hybrid pseudonym for the husband-wife artistic team.

Jane Fine has had a great time at Middlebury this year. She came with intentions of painting landscapes, although not in a literal way (landscapes traditionally being in a horizontal format with some kind of horizon line). The paintings she has begun here evolved into what she calls nightscapes, from walking the campus at night.

"The other funny and strange thing," Fine says, "is that for the first six weeks I had a pretty bad studio, with awful lighting. Since I couldn't see very well, the paintings ended up with much stronger compositions and crisper shapes than I had been working with previously." When she finally got a new studio space, she "had a gorgeous place to work with some new imagery to pursue."

At the opening reception in the gallery, Fine held a custom-frosted cupcake made for the occasion, furnished by Atwater Dining Hall. Modeled after her paintings, the sugary top was green and orange with black and hot pink swizzles of thin frosting layered on top. Fine was delighted, yet somewhat intimidated. "Wow," she says, after one bite. "That's intense."

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Jane Fine