A variety of views ‘Urban Un Urban’ is a tasteful travelogue BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Members shows can be all over the map, unless some theme confines the artists to the same territory. "Urban Un Urban," at Providence Art Club, certainly provides a wide enough umbrella: the city . . . or not. The artists got the opportunity to range anywhere under the sun. We get an opportunity to contrast and compare.

On display, of course, are plenty of the sort of travel poster and post card scenes that fill town park art festivals this time of year. In this show we can stroll through Wickford Village and see a church here, flowers at a wrought iron rail there. But for every ordinary sight, there are several with more visual than tourist interest.

The first-prize winner of this juried show is Dora Atwater Millikin’s "High Summer." The thick brushwork of the lemon-tinged sky looks beaten thin at a blacksmith’s forge, an empty patch of a traffic median at lower left giving the eye rest from the furious sky. The noonday slap of city heat is well conveyed. Perhaps even more successful with similar technique and almost identical subject matter is another oil by the same artist, "Thickly Settled," in which the droops of telephone lines are better integrated into a gray and white sky, a palette knife’s curving smears that swoop like dance partners.

We are accustomed to cinematic storytelling guiding us without words, and while a painter has only one frame to work in, no less need be said. In "Spring," Alice K. Miles merges a tree line of foliage at dusk against a cityscape skyline of low, uniform-height buildings, soft-edged and united by darkness with the rural reminder. A barest hint of meadow flowers speckles the foreground. The serene oil painting is a visual haiku rather than an essay.

The harshness of a city can be readily softened visually by reducing buildings to geometric blurs. Nancy Spencer does this effectively in "Downtown," as Joan Allen Luce does in "Weybosset" without the advantage of Spencer's bucolic patch of trees. Luce fine-tunes the effect, making brownstone and brick buildings lipstick red to provide an electric we’re-not-in-Kansas jolt.

Buildings and their façades offer rectilinear opportunities to an artist, like a brisk breeze suggests a wind-at-back run to a sailor. As in let's just get right to it. Del-Bouree Bach’s "Coney Island Shadows" has a place of prominence at the exhibition, right behind the desk in the Dodge House Gallery. (The rest of the show is in the adjacent building’s Maxwell Mays Gallery.) The long horizontal watercolor contains a toy box of squares and rectangles, showing a grimy façade with a large red arrow pointing to the entrance of a "Museum" more likely to be P.T. Barnum’s than Bilbao’s. The easily overlooked becomes a wealth of textures and compositions.

Capturing the urban gestalt with simple vertical and horizontal lines is accomplished most succinctly by Paulette H. Carr: the drawing presents us with a thick-line grid, only two squares complete, before random strokes of softer lines. Only when we read the title — "Mill Window" — do we realize that we’re not looking at a Sol LeWitt but rather at a dirt-streaked window. More titles should offer such a satisfying bonus.

Joan DeRugeris also reduces architecture to lines in "Night Light Distortion," in what could be a Lyonel Feininger cityscape of interlocking vertical planes, the upward slashes dominated by browns and yellows. As with Millikin’s paintings, inconveniently placed telephone and power lines had to be dealt with and here are politely invited to join in the composition, gracefully sweeping upward above a narrow urban alley.

But a city site can be made more recognizable than that and still be artfully done. Anthony Thomas Tomaselli has been a reliable depicter of Providence architecture, always scanning opportunities with a painterly eye and a colorist's excitement. He's represented in this show by two signature works, exploring light and dark on buildings in one and the shadow side of a bridge in the other.

When an industrial structure has to intrude into an otherwise appealing skyline, perhaps it's a good idea to place it in the best light and simply regard it as sculptural. In "Across the River," Meredith M. Thayer shows how a blazing sunset can enhance even a towering storage tank, its shadowed side deepening to cerulean blue between a tropically colorful sky and its river reflection.

Juried by Sam Ames, a professor of art at Rhode Island College, this assembly contains numerous worthy examples of landscapes as well as the cityscapes focused on above. But it is urban subject matter that is more challenging, and many such challenges have been well met in "Urban Un Urban."