If drawing is taking a line for a walk, as some artists say, then Gerald Zeldin takes us on an adventurous hike in his latest exhibition. Days of Views at the Art Gallery of Hamilton comprises nearly 40 works, most of them graphite and watercolour on paper.

The Dundas resident loves to paint and draw. His best known works are no doubt his big murals, such as the ones he's painted for Ontario Place, the Toronto Eaton Centre, Hamilton Place and the Hamilton Central Library.

An experienced illustrator who has designed posters, magazine and album covers, Zeldin also teaches drawing to animation students at Sheridan College.

This exhibition showcases Zeldin's drawing skills and his debt to illustration and animation. He organizes figures and objects into compartments as in an extended comic strip or the storyboard for an animated film.

Zeldin's stories have no plots but consist of events layered with memories, dreams and thoughts. He orders the events into compartments as a way of coming to terms with all the disparate and disconnected images that run through the mind.

Some of the works boast rectangular compartments of the same size. But in Untitled (2002), a graphite and watercolour on paper, the compartments are of different sizes. Zeldin fills these with people, buildings and other objects. Every panel is related in some way to the others.

We might start at the top left, where a picture story traditionally begins. That compartment contains two black rectangular forms thrusting upward. Though apparently hollow, they resemble twin towers, and the next compartment to the right shows us girders.

Now we are ready to embark on an architectural theme, but before we do, we are distracted by two smaller panels that seem to be falling out of the girder panel. These do not seem relevant to an architectural narrative; they feel like fleeting, disconnected memories, new thoughts interrupting the first one.

Zeldin says we don't have to move in any particular direction. Changing directions changes the narrative. So we, the viewers, participate in the creation and re-creation of the artwork.

If we start in the lower right, we encounter the back of the head and shoulders of a bald man. A similar man appears in a smaller rectangle above. Is the man in the bigger panel our narrator? Is he observing himself as an observer?

Some of the compartments are mere parts of a bigger whole: a smiling mouth packed with white teeth viewed head-on, or the top corner of a brown building seen from above.

Some panels form complementary pairs. In one panel, three faces -- one frontal and two in profile -- keep each other company. In the rectangle on the bottom left, a head in profile seems to be alone. Near the bottom centre, a leafy green plant grows in a pot, but in another panel, a similar plant floats above the pot.

You won't get lost if you expect the unexpected.

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

Showtime

Who: Gerald Zeldin

What: Days of Views

Where: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 123 King St. W.

When: until Jan. 6

Phone: 905-527-6610