From overwhelming to energetic

These are gorgeous, sweeping, and often overwhelming works. While they’re not literally landscapes, they cite them, as deep space roils with atmospheric action. Still, without a horizon line, there’s nowhere to land; the viewer gets uncomfortably swept up into the scene. Colors tense against one another. Cartoony or graphic-design elements return the eye to the painting’s surface, where fleshy forms tangle and pull, ratcheting up the drama.

Rinklin is one of a growing number of painters who start and finish with the hand, but add an intermediate step on the computer. She photographs the early stages of a piece, then distorts the image with Photoshop, making a digital sketch before going on to create her large-scale, mixed-media works. She paints her backgrounds with an airbrush, imbuing them with a comforting blur. The colors are less naturalistic than in any 19th-century painting, but familiar to users of 21st-century technology.

The orange, fleshy forms twisting diagonally across the foreground of “After the End of the Beginning’’ recall the hands of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.’’ They tumble over a ground of mauve and turquoise, sinister with shifting shadows. Translucent veils of hard-edged filigrees radiate out across the surface from the orange forms. Graphically drawn clouds in neon orange and periwinkle throw in another visual language. In “The Persistent Nature of Past, Present and Future’’ an aggressively thrusting red form explodes against a backdrop of fumy blues, grays, and greens, and a billowing ribbon of a turquoise cartoon cloud drops down the center.

The works can be daunting with all their plays of light, space, and form; Rinklin throws everything she can at the aluminum panels on which she paints. Unlike Church and Cole, she’s trying to deconstruct, rather than inspire; her paintings balance on the edge between dream and nightmare. Then again, the sublime is supposed to be awesome, on the edge of frightening.

Cleverly entrancing

There’s something a little too precious about Anne Siems’s paintings, up at Walker Contemporary, but they’re still absorbing to look at; she has entrancing technique.