Paintings of highways and New Jersey's industrial scenes are not as unusual as they once were. Today's approaches range from photographic to expressionistic. But Anne Kullaf's gift is for finding the unexpected beauty in these mundane scenes.

Kullaf, an artist from central New Jersey, has a small show at Lounge Zen, an oasis of hipness on Degraw Avenue in Teaneck. Highway scenes predominate in this show, titled "Urban Legends," but there are also cityscapes, rooftop scenes and street paintings.

There's a kind of snapshot enthusiasm to Kullaf's work that belies how craftily they are put together. She has a quick stroke, knows that getting the big things right is 90 percent of the game, doesn't fuss with detail, but composes with precision and elegance.

The world looks sweeter through her eyes. She's most comfortable with the inanimate world, but, like a good still-life artist, endows all the objects and structures she paints with the presence of something alive.

Her highways are more crowded than lonesome. Most are painted from the vantage point of someone driving along behind, the kind of thing you've seen a million times. But she makes going through a tollbooth seem like something more than the forgettable experience it almost always is. Suddenly those orange barrel-shaped traffic barriers look as jaunty as buoys bobbing in a Maine harbor.

Slick, snaking roads

Her wet-road pictures are among her best. "Even if it rains" depicts an ordinary secondary highway intersection of ramps and lanes, but the yellow headlights in the violet-gray light and the red squiggly taillight reflections on the slick road turn this into a bittersweet vignette, not film noir, but maybe film gris.

In her most ambitious painting, the 4-foot-wide "Parkway South," the double roadways of the Garden State snake sinuously into the distance, the curving lines accentuated as if drawn by a manic highway engineer. Concrete alternates with bare winter landscape. Once again, it's a gray and rainy day, giving the scene a top-to-bottom blueness and blurring everything beyond the foreground. The pack's taillights are unadulterated cadmium red, glowing like animal eyes.

"Exit 14," a picture of the Jersey City spur off the turnpike, and "Empire," of the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, combine highway scenes with cityscapes. These, like her painting of the Cross Bronx Expressway, are no-man's lands of steel, concrete, asphalt and big green highway signs. "Empire" has a touch of humor. The cars creeping toward the Lincoln Tunnel helix are jammed into the bottom few inches of this tall painting, like sardines barely visible over the rim of an opened tin.

As in Edward Hopper, light is the animating principle. She lights up brick and wood building facades with that clear North Atlantic light painters around here always talk about. A small painting of the Brooklyn Bridge just sparkles with its flat blue sky, its greenish East River and the slivers of light on the sideways Gothic arches.

Massive subjects

Kullaf's small paintings are gems, like the one of the concrete supports beneath the elevated highway titled "Convergence." Its underbelly view conveys all the massiveness and monumental weights of the subject in a canvas that is only 6 inches tall.

Lounge Zen is a congenial atmosphere for looking at paintings, as long as it's not one of those throbbing techno music nights. Sinking into one of the deep, plush couches tends to immobilize you in front of the paintings -- not a bad thing. Art takes more than a glimpse. If you have too many martinis -- the house specialty -- you may wonder about the blurriness in some of the pictures. Don't worry. The artist put it there -- a device for suppressing detail and emphasizing the big shapes -- well intended, though not always successful in the bigger pictures.

But this is a fine show by a talented artist on her way up. For a broader sense of Kullaf's work, visit her Web site. Her still-life paintings are of things you'd see around the house: dishes in the dishwasher, a shelf in the bathroom and the bottom of a closet. In one semi-comical series titled "Common Threads," she invited friends to dump their laundry on the floor of her studio and painted each as a kind of portrait in underwear and socks.

E-mail: zeaman@northjersey.com