Scott Wright gets adventurous.

He's painted while straddling a canoe.

He's taken photos from a helicopter without doors, secured with a cord so he won't fall out.

He's climbed mountains, cross-country skied and scaled bridges to find his subjects.

The derring-do allows Wright to discover dramatic perspectives and explore the complexity and the romance of river landscapes. It allows him to see, in the vastness of nature, how we are all connected to it.

A retrospective of Wright's work, "Paintings and works on Paper 1989-2009" opens tonight at the Lancaster Museum of Art, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

"Transportation has become my theme," Wright says. "Early on, it was about the thrill of being out in the landscape that got me."

But as he continued to explore, he realized that the landscape is like a large organism, it lives and breathes, reflects our own lives, pushes toward us and away from us.

That was a subject to pursue.

"I've got an attachment to the romantic American landscape," Wright explains. "And I've studied abstract expressionism, so my work is very much about surface and gesture."

His skies twirl with texture and color, his rivers twist and turn, always moving, seeking and exploring.

His colors can be dark, brooding greens and blues or light, swirly pinks and lavenders, often together in the same painting.

Wright is also a serious photographer. (He'll be having a photography show next month at the Phillips Gallery at Franklin & Marshall College, where he is an artist-in-residence.)

He takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of photos and seeks out the ones that speak to him, telling him they must come together to make a painting.

The forty or so pieces in the Lancaster Museum of Art show mainly revolve around three rivers: the Delaware, the Hudson and the Susquehanna.

Wright has lived near all three.

Sometimes, it's been in a city, like New York and, currently, Lancaster.

Other times, he's lived in rural areas, far from the madding crowd, right near the river.

He finds the Hudson a wonderfully romantic river, filled with history and emotion. His wife is from the area. The city of New York, where they lived for a time, is as much a part of the Hudson as the open, wild areas of the Adirondacks.

"When you live in a city, it becomes harder to feel the natural world," Wright says. "But there's a trade off. You become more philosophical about it, about protecting those wide open spaces."

The Delaware River represents the earliest and most abstract paintings in the show.

"They are landscapes with no horizon," Wright explains. "This is when I was really flirting with abstract expressionism, the metaphysical idea of how to paint something like photosynthesis, for example."

Wright's Susquehanna River paintings often seem bolder, tied a little more closely to man.

"It's a powerful, big, brooding river that's kind of majestic," he says.

So brooding and majestic, in fact, it prompted Wright to hire a pilot.

Going up in a plane to see his subjects has, Wright says, made him feel more in touch with them.

"It makes it more intimate," he says. "You can see patterns, how human beings have built into it and how nature pushes back."

"Scott Wright: Paintings and Works on Paper 1989-2009"

Opening reception, tonight from 5-8

Cont. through Nov. 22

Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Sun. noon-4 p.m. Free

Lancaster Museum of Art

135 N. Lime St., 394-3497
www.lmapa.org