Nancy Drosd's dog paintings began a year or so ago with a three- foot- wide likeness of a ten-inch toy poodle- an "attack poodle" named Puccini seen in extreme closeup, with its eyes touching the top of the canvas like Clint Eastwood's under that sombrero. Drosd, whose previous paintings, large-scale, fanatically detailed, oil landscapes of Central Park, sometimes showed a leashed Lab or Peke on a distant path, calls Puccini her liberator, and she has followed with similar nose-first likenesses of her subjects named Caliban and Zazi and Zoloft and Harry (above) and others she meets everyday on the bridle path off East Ninetieth Street while walking her own Beato, an amiable Spinone Italiano. Drosd works slowly, with tiny brushes, building the picture hair by hair for several weeks-or in the case of the hairy, patient Beato, longer. Quoting Bonnard (the painter, not the dog), she says that a painting is many little lies adding up to a great truth. The pack is on display until June 11 at the Tatistcheff gallery.

NANCY DROSD, Tatistcheff, 529 West 20th Street, (212) 627-4547, through Feb. 28. With small and meticulous brushstrokes Ms. Drosd conjures up an overwhelmingly lush and vivid parkscape whose trees all but swallow up the figures, mostly children, who make their way through them. In "Cherry Blossoms" a veritable explosion of floral foliage all but dwarfs two little girls. "First Snow, Fifth Avenue and 89th" coats bare trees and branches with thick crusts of white alongside a slippery path whose sole occupant is a man gingerly walking a small dog. A subtle colorist, Ms. Drosd deftly conveys the enchantments of this very special place

The beauty, drama and urban interaction are seen in an exhibition of eighteen paintimgs by Nancy Drosd at the Tatistcheff Gallery, in its new Chelsea location. Her work chronicles the evolution of the space from village green to athletic oasis. "Many of my paintings," she said, "are about running which is a metaphor for our life on the move in the city."

Viewed from a distance, Ms. Drosd's luminously flickering paintings of Central Park Joggers and pedestrians dappled or silhouetted by radiant leaf-filtered light are like Tiffany stained-glass windows; up close, they have a deft but not too fussy painterly touch.