ALBANY -- Asked once to explain his classically influenced paintings, Nicholas Poussin, the 17th-century French master, answered with typical clarity, ``I am forced by my nature toward the orderly.'' In the same spirit, painter Deborah Zlotsky is compelled toward lush complexity. Over the past five years, the Menands still-life artist has time and again proven herself a painter of triumphant technical beauty and intellectual depth.

Zlotsky and Utica sculptor Louanne Genet Getty were standouts in last summer's 2002 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Art Show. On the strength of their work there, the two women were chosen for this year's Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational, the companion exhibit mounted by Albany Center Gallery. Each year the invitational gives viewers an expansive look at one or more of the regional's participants, sometimes introducing a new name to the region, other times allowing an established artist to show a newer body of work. This invitational does both.

Zlotsky has shown often around the area, but her new work is a departure from the surreal tableaux of her previous work. Since 2001 she has painted what she calls her ``Self-Portrait Series,'' so named because it reproduces portraits of artists, living and dead, who have instructed or inspired her. The eclectic list goes well back into art history, and runs up to the present day, including painters as varied as French idealist Juan Auguste-Dominique Ingres and German expressionist Kathe Kollwitz, American elegist Edward Hopper and British portraitist Lucien Freun. Even University at Albany painting professor Mark Greenwold makes an appearance.

The twist in this serial homage is that each of Zlotsky's paintings is based on a pre-existing self-portrait taken from a book, which she incorporates into the picture. In this sense, portraiture morphs into still life, and the visual games begin: Is Zlotsky's chief subject her artist-heroes, or the books through which she encounters them? Are these pictures painterly performances, or post-modern commentary?

Yes and yes. Like the Dutch and French still-life painters she emulates, Zlotsky meditates on light and line as much as character and essence. Like a modernist, she takes liberties with perspective and angle, and in the best post-modernist fashion offers an exegesis on the work of art in the age of reproduction. As if that weren't enough, she paints with a deftness of touch and mastery of color that is endlessly pleasurable to the eyes.

On one hand, the style of the paintings changes with the style of the source material -- tight and formal in the case of Poussin, loose and expressive for Freud. On the other hand, each of the works shows Zlotsky's own painstakingly textured surface, a subtle interplay of paint and underpaint, hatchings, featurings and glazes. You look, by turns, into the pictures and at them, with satisfying complexity.

Every work of art is in some sense a self-portrait; classical Chinese critics believed you could read an artist's character in the quality of his calligraphic line. The 10 works on display by Zlotsky are part of a much larger series of portraits; could we but see all the pieces together they would, presumably, amount to a sort of visual autobiography. As it stands, we know much about her from what we have, and all of it is good.

In last summer's regional, Louanne Genet Getty's sculpture ``Home'' mounted five porthole-like constructions on a wall, each fitted with a small lens through which one could view a miniature room in startling and surreal detail. One of the five pieces was wired to a motion sensor, which activated bird song. The piece was both a sly critique on domesticity and a reverie on intimate comforts.

Getty's seven ``mixed media miniature wall installations'' in the regional invitational have some of this same smart lyricism, though with less drama. The work is based on traditional Dadaist strategies -- random juxtapositions, suggestive incongruities and trickster misdirections. The numerous tiny furnishings and accoutrement Getty assembles -- many of which she literally fashions and casts herself -- are a marvel, as are her most affective passages: the mystery of the small seated figure and the bell jar in ``In the bathroom'' (the only section of her ``Home'' sculpture included here), for instance, or the shard of patterned glass and tiny seashells in ``Medicine Cabinet.''

Getty's work is experiential the way Imagist poetry is. You don't analyze it, you inhabit it. ``Medicine Cabinet'' is part of a new suite called the ``Nurse Buttons Series,'' based on a character of the artist's fancy, but there is no narrative, per se. The pieces are mostly about themselves, and the way their elements combine via the alchemy of fragment and intuition. There is grace here, and wit, as in the titles introducing Nurse Button's ``baby shoe,'' her ``blue porcelain door knob lash,'' and her ``boar bristle body and nail brush,'' this last item mounted in silver and displayed on a narrow altar.

The pieces' miniature scale is, as the artist notes in her statement, meant to ``elicit a slowing down response in viewers.'' You can't take her work in with a glance, and the deliberateness the small scale demands is increased by the various screens, scrims and distortions Getty places between the eye and the action. One work contains text pieces so small, in light so dim, it was impossible for eyes of a certain age to make them out.

``Environment, body and home,'' Getty writes, ``are sublime historians -- organic recorders of everyday life.'' Getty is a bard of these histories, a poet of sidelong glimpses and tossed-off epiphanies.