About four years ago, I walked into the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center and burst out laughing at one of Don Coen's paintings: an airbrushed image of a clutch of cows gathered around a water trough and seemingly staring right back at me.

Imagine my surprise at being confronted by the same creatures, the denizens of Chairman of the Board, when I entered William Havu Gallery. Again, I thought, what do they want? And why do they look so much like expectant corporate types waiting to hear the latest financial report?

Coen has parlayed a love of the region - land, animals and people - into a career that pays homage to the West in a most unusual way.

That's because Coen, who lives in Boulder County, may draw heavily on his roots in his youth in Lamar. But he approaches his work without a hint of sentimentality and has chosen a difficult medium - the airbrush - in which to depict the basics of life in the West.

So the exhibition at Havu is rich with large-scale cattle and horses, but also includes several monumental landscapes that draw the viewer into the scene, from the dusty loneliness of a road outside of Omaha to a colorful, somewhat abstracted view of the Platte River at Grand Island, to a vista as familiar as it is endangered: Hay Bales on I-25.

Coen also has dipped into different mediums for this exhibition, including monotypes; several small(er) drawings in oil stick, with more vibrant, saturated color, and a couple of examples of, in essence, paintings on clay, large ceramic rounds fired in the raku method that offer a more primitive approach to the subject.

Call it a breather from the airbrush equipment. "I don't get to touch the surface of a piece when I do airbrush," he said. "That's why I love doing the raku."

The evocative nature of Coen's work grows out of being a prairie kid who visualizes moments from his childhood, augmented by trips to new locales. The roller-coaster road of 30 Miles out of Omaha Into Iowa, with its implied curves overshadowed by the linear nature of the gridded countryside, recalls trips as a child while his mother was taking lunch to his father tending cattle on the prairie adjacent to their property.

"There would be that contrail from the pickup." And the vastness of eastern Colorado.

One aspect of Coen's work not on view here is a series he began in the early 1990s after studying migrant workers in the fields in the northern part of the state. The Migrant Series, though, is almost complete, a 15-piece exploration of the people who pick our food (among other things) that incredibly timely and, I hope, bound for a splash somewhere.

The artist used his degree from the University of Denver in graphic design for years in the world of commercial design, and the precision demanded by that field persists.

But the final result is images that benefit from viewing at two distances: Because of the stippling inherent in his patterns, what looks fully defined from afar is almost Pointillist up close. Meanwhile, the pencil marks, squiggled ovals that mark where a particular color should go, remain to add texture.

And to indicate the complexity of creating what some might find a simple world, as hard as that might seem.

Don Coen

• What: Paintings, drawings, monotypes and ceramics by Coen, with "Paintings of the Hamilton's Steel," oil paintings by John Boak based on the angled beams of the Frederic C. Hamilton Building

• Where and when: William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee St.; through April 6

• Information: 303-893-2360; williamhavugallery.com

REALationships: Works of Surreal Inspiration

• What: Paintings and drawings that try to tie together the concepts of surrealism and relationships, plus "Exquisite Corpse," etchings in which multiple artists participated.

• What works: Note the "try to" in the sentence above, in terms of just how much reality is stretched in some of the works in this show. But by and large, curator Michael Chavez has picked wisely for this exhibition, including the symbolic disconnect in works by Peter Illig, eerie family scenes by Wes Magyar and Frank O'Neill, Scott Fraser's impeccable renderings of improbable situations, and Ricki Klages' metaphorical distortions of nature. Lucong's giant grid of portraits is a standout as a fractured approach to a lineup of the most wanted.

• What doesn't: Arts venues have been playing the parlor game known as "the exquisite corpse" since the original surrealists of the 1920s came up with the idea: Several artists tackle one work together, not knowing what the others have contributed. In the examples at Foothills, however, the artists may be solid, but the results are incoherent. It reminds me of a Rubik's cube, which I'd like to be able to twist in order to see an actual finished etching.

• Where and when: Foothills Art Center, 809 15th St., Golden; through Sunday

• Information: 303-279-3922; foothills artcenter.org

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677.