John Lees and Gandy Brodie are “painters’ painters.” The paintings by John Lees (1943- ), now hanging at Betty Cuningham Gallery until Nov. 11, and Gandy Brodie (1924-1975), up at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects through this Saturday, Oct. 28, exude paint upon layered paint, color upon light, and light upon color, with passion, determination, and precision. But these are very different artists. John Lees is an intimate artist, both in his motifs, such as portraits and the landscape around him, and how he approaches the process of painting. Made slowly, often over many decades, Lees’ paintings are also slow paintings to view. We sense his search, discover through close looking where he sanded-out and painted-in, and move with him as his paintings grow and evolve. Apparently, on the backs of paintings he dates each time he returns to the canvas, giving added weight to the importance process and development have for him. His paintings, however, are not just about paint. They are externalizations of his inner psyche, metaphors of something larger, something deeper than simple portraits or landscapes. With a tinge of humor and references to childhood TV shows like The Howdy Doody Show or Krazy Kat, or songs, his paintings embody some of the underlying insecurities and complex relationships between the characters that clearly have lived within Lees his whole life. Gandy Brodie, on the other hand, is a painter of grunge, of NYC, of tensions between anguish and hope. Lines taken from the Williamsburg Bridge cables crisscross in hectic chaos, street posters jump out and dissolve as they are eaten by paint, and even a flower bouquet becomes a jagged jumble of unstable movement. Still, Brodie’s paintings are not just anguish, but in subtle ways suggest possible resolution. The letter “B” in a graffiti phrase, Post No Bills is crossed out to read Post No Ills, his bridge lines, as he says, “cross out all the memories of sorrow that the city is bound to create,” and the flower has a certain underlying warmth.