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"Sugar Bowl" by Gerry Gilberti, photograph.

"Serenity," The Artists Alliance of East Hampton's (AAEH) opening season show at East Hampton Town Hall, seeks to "bring peace and tranquility into an environment where tension is the norm," says curator Joanne Rosko. A painter who has worked with the Southampton Artists Alliance – this is her first show for the East Hampton group - Rosko explains that she wanted to mount an exhibit that would remind those coming to Town Hall, usually with weighty issues on their mind, of kinder, gentler occasions. Though the new Court House next door is now the center of judicial activity, the rooms at 159 Pantigo Road remain as they were and function as meeting sites for various organizations. Depending on the discussions, 159 can be a "stressful place," and so the challenge to members was to offer work that might soothe the soul.

A one-room space, however, meant that participants had to be limited. The 15 or so pieces on view were not all easily seen unless viewers threaded their way around the courtroom seats. Rosko felt that the configuration of the room did not allow her to exercise her own "style of hanging" - having lots of white space surrounding each work – she thinks that the final selections evidence "picky, selective" criteria.

Opening day, March 14, was festive, including a table of goodies that included Rosko's own super-rich cookie cakes. There were also a number of artists on hand who wanted to talk about how they interpreted the show's theme.

"Dragon Tat" by Lynn Matsouka, oil and graphite on paper.

It was an "open call," Rosko says, speaking of the selection process, but devolved into "first come, first served." Unlike Southampton, which can accommodate multiple submissions from many members, AAEH limited submissions to one entry each, though two members did get to show two pieces. The exhibit theme is clearly seen in Rosko's own work, "Low Tide/Summer Day," a smoothly painted seascape that reflects her association with Plein Air Peconic. Various blues swept with white, green and gray slip across a high-horizon line canvas, creating, in effect, a three-tiered picture of sky, water and land.

Cynthia Loewens', "Foggy Beach," a peaceful take on a stormy day, with blues and whites set off by a darkened sky and lone gull that balances the composition, is identified as an archival print, but is revealed to be a photo of a painting. Her "Little Beach Girl," an acrylic, seems based on a photograph (or could it also be the other way around?). In contrast, Frank Sofo's nearby acrylic, "Lazy Days", uses a full palette, but generates an overall muted effect with impressionistic brush strokes of reclining girl, sand, and sky.

Marcia Tucker also makes a minimalist color appearance with "Boat Landing," it's a flat background blue set against a thickly painted foreground ochre sand and bold green grass. Rich green marks Alyce Peifer's "Town Line Road Farm Field," as well, a tranquil composition of angled rows, as it does Eileen Dawn Skretch's "Louse Point Cedars" oil of full-summer trees accented with darker hues. Summer continues in Angela Flood's oil, "Mild Breeze at Sea," where a white sailboat plies its windy way across a bold blue sea, gestured streaks in the water repeated in the sky.

For something serenely different in subject matter, genre and technique, Howard Lazar obliges with "Yellow Dress," an acrylic on thick canvas that actually shows a black head and torso in a white dress, the whole surrounded by a yellow-white aura which, in turn, is surrounded by bold yellow brush strokes over black. Travis King's nearby acrylic "Juxtapose" offers calm by way of an almost symmetrical abstract design of a warm-toned torso in yoga pose.

Other artists include Dru Frederick with a gouache and watercolor, "Towd Point Light," free-form pastel hues that glide across the canvas. Gerry Gilberti presented "Sugar Bowl," an unusual wine-colored photo of the big Napeague dune, "meant to look like a copper plate etching," the artist offers. Lynn Matsuoka's "Dragon Tat" oil and graphite on paper, showing a squatting figure - kinetic energy at the center of a three-part composition. Finally, there are two paintings by Greg Samuelson, a small oil "Mild Bridge at Sea" which depicts a tropical evocation of Charleston, full of bright greenery and yellow flowers and their reflection in water, and "Morning Haze, Indian Wells Beach," a fine light gray and beige-inflected wash, with a just-right touch of a lone bird overhead.

Arguably, the most compelling piece in the show is Aija Meister's oil, "Flowers in a Blue Vase," which dazzles with its arrangement of red-pink poppies that morph decoratively into smaller flowers of different pigments in the upper canvas, the whole effectively framed in wood and gold leaf that enhances the pattern of the floral shapes and textures.

 • The exhibit runs through April 4. East Hampton Town Hall is located at 159 Pantigo Road, East Hampton.

"Louse Point Cedars" by Eileen Dawn Skretch, oil on wood.

Joan Baum lives in Springs and covers literature and the arts for print and radio.