At 84, Jane Freilicher understands more than most painters that the landscape, whether urban or pastoral, is humankind’s living record. For over 50 years she has painted the vistas seen from her homes in Water Mill, Long Island, and Greenwich Village in New York City, and in doing so, movingly witnessed these disparate environs as they have changed.

Mira Schor’s small, unframed paintings—oil on linen and ink on gessoed tracing paper—suggest the vulnerability of barely formed thoughts arising unbidden between waking and sleep.

“Infinite Patience” draws together three artists who have been developing their approaches and iconographies since the 1970s. What unites the trio—James Drake, Kunié Sugiura and Stanley Whitney—is a “not-quite” sensibility, a willingness to resist categorization.

Erik Parker, in his first New York show since 2005, turns to portraiture in his own exploration of the limits of recognition. Leaving aside the Rorschach-like symmetry of his earlier work, he has created large-scale portraits (most 2008-09) that are fragmented to smithereens. Our eye flickers over the jumble, sorting out the nose, locating the eyes, assembling the possible ears and tongues.

For his latest exploration of the landscape’s elasticity, painter Brendan Cass has landed upon a perfect psychic convergence of Jackson Pollock and PBS instructional painting guru Bob Ross. While the seven mostly large-scale canvases in the exhibition “New Nature” romanticize the environment with a slightly hippy-dippy naivete, they also make a rather sophisticated and compelling case for the redemptive power of contemporary painting. By approaching the landscape from an almost completely imaginary perspective, Cass is able to strike a fragile balance between the picturesque and the gestural.