Maud Lewis, one of Canada's leading folk artists, said she was truly happy when she was painting. Her good mood is contagious and can be caught at Wit and Whimsy: Folk Art in Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton's banner exhibition this summer.

The exhibition brings together more than 50 paintings and three-dimensional works by Canada's top 20th-century folk artists. If you enjoyed the Joe Norris exhibition four summers ago -- or if you missed it -- this one is for you.

Folk artists love to depict humans at work and play and many kinds of animals. All are rendered in a lifelike but simplified style with lively colours. Wood and metal are popular materials and some of the objects are functional, such as furniture and bird houses.

Folk artists are true regionalists, depicting the world they know best, a world where cows are milked, barns are raised and fish are caught.

Nova Scotia's Joe Norris and Joe Sleep were both fishermen who began creating art after illness forced them to give up fishing.

Sleep's The World (1973-77) is a good example of the simplified yet richly detailed style that characterizes much of this show. Sleep divides his tapestry-like painting into horizontals and fills them with animals. Sea creatures, big and small and all in profile, swim in the lowest register. Sleep chooses a varied bunch, including a crab and a whale.

Next up is a narrow, grassy zone filled with yellow birds.

Above this, rabbits coexist with bigger creatures such as an elephant, kangaroo and moose.

The animals stand in front of tall trees whose spindly branches bear red berries. Birds inhabit the topmost register, the sky.

Sleep frames his painting with a decorative border which consists of compartments in different hues. Every compartment contains a creature: fish along the bottom, birds across the top and donkeys down the sides.

Billy Andrews, who worked in Ontario, loves animals and birds, too, but his are three-dimensional. His Great Blue Heron (1977), carved from wood, looks more lifelike than Sleep's animals and much bigger.

Andrews carves some of the two-metre-tall bird's feathers in low relief and others in dramatic high relief. The bird's long yellow beak and green glass eyes ooze personality.

So does Nova Scotian Ralph Boutilier's sculptural Bluejay (1970s). Made from wood and tin, it is flying, its stylized wings raised and tail erect.

White Cat by Lewis (1955) is posed, not among birds, but among flowers. Lewis makes the cat big and frontal, like some kind of formal portrait.

She flattens the feline form and offsets the dominant whiteness by adding some colourful plants around it. Paintings by Lewis are also included in an accompanying exhibition of Canadian folk art from the private collection of Susan A. Murray. Stephen Inglis of the Canadian Museum of Civilization will give two talks about Canadian folk art on Thursday, July 5, at the AGH. Each event -- at 2 and 6:30 p.m. -- includes refreshments and a guided tour of the Wit and Whimsy exhibition in addition to Inglis's presentation. For tickets, call 905-527-6610, ext. 250.

Regina Haggo, a former professor

of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.

dhaggo@thespec.com