By Kyle McMillan
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic

Article Launched: 11/04/2005 01:00:00 AM

Good artists never are satisfied. They are always thinking and rethinking their work, looking for new expressive possibilities and seeking to improve.

Their art constantly evolves, frequently offers surprises and never fails to reward viewers, whether longtime fans or newcomers.

Sarah McKenzie is not just a good artist, she is a very good artist. In fact, she consistently has been one of the best painters showing in Denver over the past five years.

Just seeming to get better and better with each passing year, the former Boulder resident is back for another knockout exhibition, showing 16 recent paintings through Nov. 12 at the Sandy Carson Gallery.

In previous works and some of the slightly older offerings here, she explores the frontiers of suburbia, offering aerial views of the collision of nature with the numbing redundancy and regularity of a contemporary subdivision.

In the 2005 paintings, she zooms in on the construction of individual suburban homes, fascinated by the repeating patterns of joists and studs, oddly angled perspectives ("Framed," a 4-by-6-foot oil on canvas, is almost vertiginous) and multiple levels of activity.

But the precise subject matter of these paintings is not of key importance, because faithful realism is not her goal. Instead, she amplifies and stretches the reality to fit the compositional needs of the painting and her larger artistic concerns.

"My work is moving away from issues of suburbia,"

McKenzie writes. "The more recent recent paintings are much more about the nature of paintings and abstraction."

That has always been the case, at least in her more recent work. Her best paintings hover in a tantalizing realm between representation and abstraction, with the latter on the verge of winning out.

That is certainly true in one of the exhibition's standouts, a 6-foot-square oil on canvas titled "Build Up." It almost blurs into geometric abstraction with its insistent rows of roof joists and intersecting lines, the composition enhanced by its ambiguous levels.

Even more abstract are the series of four foot-square paintings on panels that relate to "Build Up" and "Framed." Each of the eight is a close-up of a section in one of the two large-scale paintings - an innovative and fascinating idea.

All that would be reason enough to view these paintings, but there is also the added benefits of McKenzie's compellingly expressionistic paint-handling, luscious surfaces and striking use of color within a largely limited palette of tans and taupes.

The former instructor at the University of Colorado at Denver left in 2001 to teach at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she was recently promoted to associate professor.

Despite her success as a teacher, she has decided to pursue painting full time. And there is even a possibility she might soon return to the Denver-Boulder area, a move that could only be a boon to the local art scene.