Kristine Bouyoucos' work makes me elated to be a girl and outdoorsy. Not because you have to be female to enjoy her art, but because she infuses her prints with fragile and subtly dark beauty as complex and changeable as the finest perfume or the feminine mind. Her layered prints read like an Emily Dickinson poem, are richly populated with the elegant gesture of lines and pattern found in nature, and brought out my giddy delight in all things joyful and pretty - including bittersweet Death. Now showing at the Arts and Cultural Council is a collection of her mixed-media prints on paper.

Bouyoucos has a strong handle on the ethereal, delicate, and transient nature of nature. She is able to replicate the feeling of walking in the woods and being struck breathless by what is found there, as well as the undying urge that we mortals have to bring it back into our dwellings, record it, unlock it, preserve it. "The world around us contains so many mysteries to be uncovered," she explains in her artist statement, "both by looking closely at what is hidden or by magnifying the familiar."

The gorgeous, denim-y indigo blue is the dominant hue in her work, but she occasionally strays to warmer pastures with washes of rusty red. "Guardians" is one of her many triptych prints, with images of a richly patterned blue and white china dish, two eggs with the same swirling pattern burrowed in a bird's nest, and birds in a mid-air dance, their splay of feathers mirroring the curve of the floral motif lifted from the china.

In "Birch Forest" (one of my favorite earthly objects since first reading Robert Frost), the trees are reduced to the essentials: blue simple linear forms glowing on a textured, olive-colored ground. Though markedly the most minimal print in the show, it is captivating nevertheless, and its simplicity contrasts greatly with the busier print "Forest Song." The collage contains flora, birds, butterflies, and squirrels, all layered with snowy birches and sheet music. Here, Bouyoucos shows off her knack for pairing vibrant, rich colors with faded layers.

Next the artist brings us indoors to the private study of a natural scientist in "A Beautiful Mind," a solar etching with color transparencies that speaks of the human fascination with pattern and code in nature. Imagery includes geometric shapes, numerals, books, ready-to-pin butterflies, and a diagram of some creature's spiral dwelling - snail or nautilus - set up to be Fibonacci-ally dissected.

Bouyoucos is a native of Norway, now American, and has trekked the world, an aspect that definitely shows in her work. "Carnival" is a series of mixed-media prints like woven textiles from cultures that still weave meaning into their fashion, fibrous stories in bold hue and pattern. Varied Edition No. 3 in this series plays optical tricks with its subtly shifting colors in layers that seem to roll under your careful gaze.

"Perennials IV" is a nearly monochrome combination of paper-bruising blues, the floral textures ranging from solid glacial fields of petals to lacey whispers of leaves. To the right are three more prints from the varied edition, each made of the same images in different color combinations, causing the components to pop forward or fall back.

The second half of the room seems to move from the innocent beauty of natural forms and figures to a fixation with being and non-being (still evocative of Emily Dickinson). "Eulogy II" incorporates a repetition of a child-round, haunting face whose disturbing eyes have the milky appearance of blindness, but are somehow focused and ghostly aware. Slight confusion plays about the brow, and the image is overrun by a layer of squiggly lines - since the piece is about death, I wonder if they represent worms.

"Eulogy I" is a rearrangement of similar imagery, in which the cold blue cast on the face is more evident, and a transparent layer over the central face carries barely perceptible words, of which I was able to detect "doth grieve" and "have vengeance for it."

In "Looking for ‘Right Now,'" the same pensive, unseeing face is layered sickly with branchlike veins, and one eye is surrounded by the outline of a rounded square. I struggle with commentary on mortality and being present in the moment. The face is bordered on both sides by stark stacks of circles like cells; hives, holes make up the whole. In "Path Forward," geometric forms fade in and out, surrounding a central maze-like form with what reminds me of "You are here" targeting in the middle.

The show left me torn between setting down in a garden with a book of zen poetry or rushing off to buy a few yards of toile. More than anything, it made me starved for the moments of blissful meditation in nature, those scraps of time that hold us together through the rushing rest of it. Who could have guessed the connective capacity of petals and wings? 

Monoprints & Small Editions

By Kristine T. Bouyoucos

Through September 11

Gallery at the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester, 277 N Goodman St

473-4000, artsrochester.org

Monday-Friday 10a.m.-4p.m.