In a holiday season with omens of war in the offing, art that's warm and fuzzy and frankly decorative in intent may be just the thing to help us through a New Year fraught with uncertainty.

So you may want to check out the lovely show of contemporary-style Post-Impressionist paintings by Joan Cox and Sheep Jones at the Beveled Edge Gallery in Mount Washington. (So what if Post-Impressionism is already more than 100 years old? Some styles never lose their charm.)

Forget about the accompanying artist's statements that seem to want to weigh down these well-crafted, brilliantly colored botanical images with more than their fair share of profundity. Why shouldn't a painting just be a pretty thing to put on a wall, no explanation needed?

Cox's large paintings of pears, plums and flowers show that she has studied Cezanne and van Gogh and their painterly renderings of organic volumes (also, perhaps, the still-life experiments of early photographic Pictorialists like Clarence White and Edward Steichen).

She favors a harmonious but rather intense palette of blues, oranges, yellows and rusts that make her fruits seem to sit up on the canvas and beg to be touched, against backgrounds that are sometimes smoky and mysterious, sometimes all clear luminous innocence.

Some of Cox's paintings incorporate poetry or poetic phrases in the image, also purposeful scratches, drips and splashes of turpentine that add visual interest without distracting too much attention from the main subject.

In short, these are paintings that are easy to like, and probably easy to live with, too.

Sheep Jones' paintings of utility sheds, legumes and bugs are smaller in scale than Cox's but no less colorful or emotionally intense. Many of these pieces seem to be about boundaries - between earth and sky, air and water, exterior and interior.

Somehow, the most affecting pictures for me were of the sheds, whose casual, improvised architectures seemed to lend themselves to all sorts of abstracted musings about landscape, the environment and a powerful sense of place - without, however, being about anywhere in particular.

The show runs through the end of January. The gallery is at 5909 Falls Road. Hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 410-435-1427.

Thread by thread

Francisco Loza is a Mexican artist whose colorful images woven out of yarn, on view at Sassafras gallery through Dec. 28, pay homage to the Native American cultures of the Sierra Madre mountains.

Many of Loza's "yarn paintings" depict traditional Native American festivals and holiday celebrations, such as the Day of the Dead, in which revelers parade through the streets singing and dancing and wearing brilliantly colored costumes.

Other works reflect aspects of Native American religious, communal and family life, particularly among the Huichol people of the Mexican states of Nayarit and Jalisco, with whom the artist lived and worked for more than a decade.

"The indigenous Huichols have established a magical alliance with nature through their religion," Loza has written. "Their religion is based on ceremonies guided by the marakames, or shamans, who express their culture and traditions through offerings and artwork."

Loza's artworks consist of images painstakingly constructed out of hundreds of individual threads of yarn attached to wood panels by various adhesive waxes. The resulting fabric images have the qualities both of embroidery and knitting, though the threads are held in place by the panels' wax backing rather than traditional stitching.

This is an intriguing show that invites viewers into a still vibrant but geographically remote culture whose rituals and beliefs are as beautiful as they are strange.

Sassafras is at 3200 Barclay St. Hours are Friday 5 p.m.-9 p.m., Saturday 7 a.m.-1 p.m., and by appointment. Call 410-366-6467.