Artworks Up for Grabs Cooperative's members exhibit a variety of offerings that are priced to appeal to holiday shoppers

You'd never know it from the recent record-breaking high temperatures, but it's that time of year.

As has long been customary during the November-December holiday season, a number of visual-art venues in the Triad are presenting group exhibitions geared toward viewers who might want to buy gifts of original art for their friends or family members.

Among those venues, and conveniently located in the center of Winston-Salem's downtown Arts District, is Artworks Gallery. Eighteen of the Artworks cooperative's 22 member artists are showing affordably priced works in this "Art Affair," as the show is titled.

The styles, mediums and subject matter represented are varied, but about one-third of the artists treat landscape themes in at least some of their contributions to the show.

Jody Danner Walker takes the most conventional approach to landscape art in her small pastel of a familiar view of Old Salem in a style that might be called folk impressionism. She does the same in another pastel, but I'm not sure why she cut it into three vertical strips of different widths and separated them a quarter-inch apart in their frame.

Holly Wilbur's three straightforward color photographs might be characterized as cloudscapes, since they all emphasize dramatic cloud formations and spectacular celestial lighting effects over the unremarkable ground-level views at the bottom of each one, including a south-facing view of the Fourth Street bridge over Business I-40.

Somewhat less obvious in their approach to rendering the local landscape are Chris Flory's small watercolor and color-pencil views of Pilot Mountain. Flory has rendered the familiar landmark in a loose, expressionistic style, oddly tropical colors and angular segments that she has reshuffled to push the image toward abstraction.

In a related vein is Virginia Ingram's small abstracted landscape in pastel and gouache, centering on a silver-encircled disc hovering above a row of stylized plant forms.

An abstracted, pastel-hued river landscape serves as the cover image on Mary Beth Blackwell Chapman's River Book, whose pages are sparely collaged with images and text related to the river theme.

Blackwell Chapman is also represented by two ceramic pedestal sculptures, one descriptively titled Split Pod. Her other, quirkier sculpture depicts two figures with tree-bark-like skin who appear to have been running toward each other when they met in a rather awkwardly dance-like collision as one was evidently trying to leap over the other.

Landscape elements in the form of trees and leaves figure at least peripherally in Alix Hitchcock's monotypes augmented with color pencil. Two of them center on silhouetted figures in dance-like postures, resonating with the figural sculpture by Blackwell Chapman. The highlight of Hitchcock's three pieces is Two Birds, in which dark and light versions of the same bird fly off in opposite directions from a central, vertically oriented tree branch. Speaking of plant forms, two of the show's most striking pieces are Kimberly Varnadoe's elegant charcoal drawings of flowers (a Dutch iris and a Southern magnolia). Both are depicted in enlarged close-up views that lend them a monumental quality. The title of the series they're part of is "Ishimoto's Hana," referencing the Japanese photographer on whose images these drawings are based.

Plant forms of one kind or another are also integral to all four of Mona Wu's intimately scaled, festively colored collages, which are otherwise predominantly abstract.

Nelida Otero Flatow isolates loosely rendered individual images of seashells and other small, aquatic life forms (including a seahorse) on neutral grounds in the 12 roughly 5-by-5-inch canvases that make up her "Sealifes" series.

As in a solo show she had at Artworks last spring, Anne Kesler Shields delved into her archive of printmaking experiments from the 1960s and '70 for the gallery's holiday "Art Affair." She's represented by two dot-patterned op-art silkscreens -- from 1968 and 1970, respectively -- that are also among the show's most striking pieces. Also noteworthy are Don Green's two mobiles, apparent homages to Alexander Calder, who pioneered the mobile form.

Other group exhibitions oriented toward holiday gift-buying at downtown art galleries include the "Winter Showcase" at Associated Artists Gallery and a rather hodge-podge group show at Urban Artware. The former show brings together paintings and sculptures by several Associated Artists members; highlights in the latter show include Ian Bredice's cartoon-style paintings of robots, Jeff Niel's hand-cranked wooden mechanisms and Leanne Blake-Pizio's ceramic figures based on Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books.

■ "Art Affair" is on view through Dec. 29 at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St. Call 336-723-5890. "Winter Showcase" runs through Jan. 11 at Associated Artists Gallery, 301 W. Fourth St.;call 336-722-0340; Urban Artware's group show, at 206 W. Sixth St., runs through Dec. 31; call 336-722-2345.