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The artist and poet Douglas Florian is best known for writing and illustrating award-winning children's books that are wittily educational, especially about animals. Working in gouache with collage, he depicts just about anything with an impressive combination of accuracy and improvisation and is similarly free with language. Mr. Florian, who always works on paper bags, has shown in art galleries since 1985, presenting work that is generally more abstract if no less playful than his illustrations. Here his excellent eye for color shines, and an organic multiculturalism is given full expression. Tantra, Elizabeth Murray, maps, free-range calligraphy, Marimekko handmade wrapping paper and Gerhard Richter all come to mind in this show of 33 small paintings, most done this year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THURSDAY night is gallery trolling night in Chelsea, so it was not surprising last week to find a crowd upstairs at the Max Lang gallery, examining the early works of the interior designer Scott Sanders. Under the proud eye of the curator, Shirley Sanders, the crowd examined drawings like ''Self-Portrait With Rosy Cheeks,'' a crayon on paper, from 1969, which showed a grinning little boy in dark glasses who looked eerily like the 47-year-old Mr. Sanders looks today; ''Colonial Home,'' a ballpoint pen on paper, from 1977; and ''Mega Mansion,'' a marker-pen drawing on paper, from 1975, of a great house set on a hilly landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Let's get one thing straight: John Currin can draw, but he's no draftsman. His material attraction to paint -- whether in the glowing flesh of his Cranach-inspired nudes or the crude impasto complexions of more modern subjects -- is undeniable. And life drawing has a limited role in his practice, despite his oft-professed interest in the old masters and his self-consciousness about being a figurative painter. So a certain degree of skepticism may accompany a visit to ''John Currin: Works on Paper -- A Fifteen Year Survey of Women,'' at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. What can these 77 drawings, most from the 1990s, tell us about this much-dissected artist or his way of seeing the world that we don't already know, in richer and more compelling detail, from his paintings? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HAVING spent too much time idling in hotel rooms, Christina Kruse, the hauntingly beautiful German model, decided in the mid-'90s to take up a hobby. So she bought a Mamiya camera and became her own guinea pig, dressing up as different characters and posing for herself. Then she began gluing the photos into travel journals (or ''Reisebuchs,'' as she calls them) and creating intricate collages that elegantly combined gouache and newsprint, colored tape and metallic paper. ''They became like a language I had with myself,'' she said. Nowadays, Ms. Kruse has a studio in Brooklyn and a costume closet the size of a small bedroom. Her photos have been published in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Interview; and last week, her first solo show in the United States opened at Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. On view is a range of evocative, often amusing self-portraits and collages, as well as ''Reisebuch 1-5,'' her limited-edition artist's book, painstakingly self-published in Germany. So much for free time. As she noted, ''It took forever to do them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''Beyond the Canon: Small Scale American Abstraction, 1945-1965'' has a portentous, this-will-change-everything title. The show itself, at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea through Saturday, is a big grab bag. Capricious, uneven and at times overly homogenous, it mixes together unknown gems, golden oldies and undistinguished work. But while it may ultimately reinforce as much as shake up the canon it takes to task, its relatively unfiltered view of art history is a wonderful thing to sort through. The spacious Miller gallery is lined with a thoughtfully installed parade of more than 90 small paintings, paintings on paper and drawings by nearly 70 artists whose reputations run the gamut from unknown to world famous. Most of the works were made in New York in the late 1940s and '50s. But a handful of them fall outside the show's 1945-to-1965 time slot, confusingly broadening its span to 1930-78. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]