LEWISTON — As children, many of us began to learn about the greater world beyond family and backyard from picture books. Those books tended to paint that world in bigger pictures—they could have been about the wider world in general, about our own or any other country.

I went through quite a number of them myself, in the subjects—if not the sequence listed above—and I loved every page. Most of this happened before first grade; after that I was on my own. All of those books had two things in common: they all had pictures—just as their definition specifies—and they all had characters. Those characters came in a variety of types. They could be people—usually kids, to get right down to business; they could be animals—another favorite to identify with, or—they could be anything else, including the inanimate. But it was the pictures that were most important to us. They seemed somehow alive, and remained so in our imaginations. They were our introduction to art, though we probably didn’t call it that at the time, and if we’re lucky, that “aliveness” of art has stayed with us on into our grownup lives.

The current exhibit at the Atrium Art Gallery has all — most, I should really say—of the above: Pictures, to begin with, without which none of the others could make themselves visible — and characters — human, animal and inanimate — some even inorganic. The one different characteristic each of these stories have is their specific place in the world. They’re not about the rest of the planet, they’re all about Maine—and all 14 of their artists are right here, living “life as it should be” on the better side of the state line. And nearly all of those 14 have series of works from multiple books in this show.

Let’s start right out with the inanimate. There are two pictures by Mary Beth Owens in Ethel Pochocki’s romance of “Rosebud and Red Flannel,” two characters hanging on a clothes line. Rosebud is a “beautiful lacy nightgown” and Red Flannel is a set of woolen long johns. In Owens’ near-realistic first image here (and she has many more from other books elsewhere in this exhibit), a low breeze seems to be blowing; in the second it’s a howling wind, which, we are told, rips Rosebud and Red Flannel off the line and plants them in a snow bank three towns away. In the spring, a farmer finds them and they become scarecrows, both in the same field and happy together. Similarly, in Ellen Bryan Osbed’s “A Letter From the Snow,” Gordon Hammond gives us six black-ink drawings covering a winter night when inanimate objects write friendly letters to a little girl.

Now for the animals—domestic or wild. We have a few series given over almost exclusively to them; Kathleen E. Fox’s wild-scrawled water-color images of “Beowulf of Maine,” a Newfoundland dog who lives in Tenants Harbor and takes on his own Grendels—a fox, a coyote puppy and a “dragon” made of old, rusted metal parts. On much more calm and peaceful levels we have Cathryn Falwell’s beautifully colored collages of turtles on a log being startled successively by the leap of a frog, then by a chickadee and finally by a butterfly; Laura Rankin’s “Six Dragonflies Fly in the Spring,” “Nine Turtles Sun Themselves on a Log as Spring turns to Summer” and “Eighteen Monarch Butterflies Flutter as the Leaves Fall.”

Dahlov Ipcar, probably the best-known artist in this exhibit, has nature work from five separate books hanging on the walls here, including two outstanding pieces from “My Wonderful Christmas Tree”: “Five Raccoons” and “Seven Ruffed Grouse.” And, for the very youngest of our young readers, Charlotte Agell gives us lively watercolors from her book “To the Island,” nine pieces on Rabbit, Dragon, Chicken, and Cat.

Of course none of the subjects in our three categories—human, animal, inorganic—exists alone in either fact or fiction, and the “animal” here advances from seashells and barnacles, to beautiful crows eating beautiful grapes in Mimi Gregoire Carpenter’s illustrations for a little girl’s vacation in Judith W. Monroe’s “Summer Week” — a motif that carries on into starfish, fireflies and two other little girls eating jellyfish sandwiches and seaweed soup in Jamie Hogan’s “Seven Days of Daisy.” Among the more humorous pieces in the show are Chris Van Dusen’s “A Camping Spree for Mr. Magee” and “Learning to Ski With Mr. Magee.”

Some of these books seem more complex than others. Of the several here illustrated by Jeannie Brett, the most outstanding is “L is for Lobster: A Maine Alphabet,” which runs A to Z—Augusta to the Zillions of stars over the state at night. Brett’s Lobster is shown on a background of brilliant red. Her colors are bright and her R is for rock—the rocky background behind what I, playing the same ground, might spell as a Beach where several kids are playing, while the artist in the foreground paints a Gull that stands on a Stone immediately in front of her, all of this under a brilliant blue Sky.

Kelly Paul Briggs’ “Lighthouse Lullaby” series shows an island family getting ready for a winter night: bringing in the livestock while the wild animals go about their own ways, a little boy lies in bed with a teddy bear and a cat, and the father climbs up in the tower to keep passing ships safe.

Kevin Hawkes “The Wicked Big Toddlah” may be the greatest hit of the season. The world’s biggest baby taking up the entire bed of a lumber truck, in order to be carried home from the hospital. Four men are pushing his rear end up onto the truck, two others strapping him down. It gets even better from there.

To top all this off, we get off the page and into sculpture: Remember “Beowulf’s” dragon of old rusty metal? Nathan Nichols outdoes the dragon. A surprisingly un-abstract sand crane about five feet tall, made of welded snowmobile mufflers and scrap metal; a heron with wings made of a shovel blade; a cormorant with wings of welded garden rakes; an oversized lobster also made of shovel blades, springs, and scraps, and a nutty crab of welded nuts, pliers, and, of course, more scraps. Collectively, they could fill a playpen for regressively-inclined adults.

See this show. Take your time. There’s so much more of it than I can give here.

IF YOU GO

“Tell Me a Story: About Maine”

Children’s Book Illustrations by Maine Artists

July 26-November 23, 2013

Atrium Art Gallery

University of Southern Maine, Lewiston-Auburn College

Gallery hours: Aug. 19 – Aug. 30, Monday – Friday, 8 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.; 

Sept. 3 – Nov. 23, Monday – Thursday, 8 a.m. – 8 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.;

Saturday, Sept. 7 – Nov.  23, 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.; closed holidays