Leeks, Karyn Frances Gray explains, are very architectural. "They look like Gothic cathedrals.' And the more you look at the pair of leeks she has painted in her highly detailed, stylized manner, the more you realize the statement is true.

Prints of Gray's trendy paintings of vegetables, fruits, and leaves are found worldwide in such stores as Pier I Imports and Crate & Barrel, and sometimes they show up where she least expects. Gray opened a magazine one day and saw a furniture ad. Above the sofa were two of her leaf prints.

Gray grew up in East Cambridge, spent 18 years working in California's Silicon Valley, and is now immersing herself in Cape Cod and absorbing its flavor. Gray, owner of Damselfly Studio and Gallery in Sandwich, has already won two awards from the Cape Cod Art Association, including "Best of Show " at CCAA`s Golden Year Anniversary Show this year. She also was accepted into the juried show "Women Creating" at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit this past spring. She's achieved more success here in a year than in the five years she painted in California.

The Cape Cod Gray has come to know isn't that of wide beach scenes and picturesque lighthouses painted by so many artists. She's fascinated with beach pebbles, regional plants and vines, even

"decaying barns." Gray is enamored of Sandy Neck and Scorton Creek in Sandwich. And she swears she won't ever paint a lighthouse. "The first thing I painted that was 'Cape-like' was in February," she recalls. "I drove up to Scorton Creek. There were these skeletal forms left from grasses, weeds, and wildflowers set against a fence post."

Her Cape paintings are isolated images created from on-site observations and her imagination. Her starkly painted still-lifes are similar to the botanicals she's recognized for. These works seem to stop just short of photorealism.

Gray majored in fine arts and graphic design at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., but when she graduated, Gray felt she had no marketable skills. "I couldn't type; I couldn't take shorthand:' she says. "I went to work at the Pentagon, and they asked me what I could do. 'I can draw,' I said." A department head who saw her portfolio told Gray that if she could draw naked bodies, she could certainly draw battleships, and so she spent the next five years doing presentation graphics for the Navy Department.

Gray's stint for the Navy fine-tuned her eye for detail, but it was a three-month accelerated graduate course in scientific illustration at the Smithsonian Institute and Guild for Natural Science Illustrators that "taught me how to see," she says.

After completing her course of study at the Smithsonian, Gray worked in the electronics industry around the Washington beltway. She then headed for California with a friend in 1978, where she spent the next 18 years, eventually landing a lucrative job with Apple Computer. The frenetic lifestyle of a 70 to 80 hour work week and constant travel took its toll. After learning she had rheumatoid arthritis, Gray reassessed her personal priorities. She began to paint more and work less, even taking a sabbatical to pursue her dream of becoming a fine artist.

No matter where Gray goes, whether to Scorton Creek or Sandy Neck-her places—or even to the grocery store, she's gathering ideas for new paintings. One trip to Sandy Neck resulted in a breakthrough work for the artist. Gray was gathering rocks along the shore when she looked up to the horizon. The seascape she painted reflects this experience. Painted as a diptych, Beach Walk features subtly colored stones massed together in one frame with the expanse of sky in another. "I want people to see things as if they are seeing them for the first time," she says.

Gray looks at things as if she is seeing them anew, even though the objects may be quite commonplace. She's currently transferring the botanical design elements that made her a commercial success in California to her new Cape Cod scenes, working to achieve a more painterly style. "Sometimes I even dream about a painting," she reflects.

One of her earlier California paintings was a row of pears. Gray painted the pears again this year, and the two watercolors are strikingly different, an exercise in how a change of place can alter artistic vision. This painting titled simply The Pears won "Best of Show" at the Cape Cod Art Association this year. But it seems as if those famous leaves first painted in California will follow her a bit longer. Some of her leaf paintings have been chosen to appear in the Smithsonian's Audubon show this October at the National Portrait Gallery. Gray couldn't be more thrilled.

She's also very busy. She joined the Cape Cod Art Association soon after moving to the Cape and has been active in the community, serving as a mentor for a young art student in the School to Careers Partnership program, for example.

Her gallery also shows works by other artists: monotypes by Claire Marcus, handmade Sandwich baskets by Susan Hirtle, and items from the Great Nature Earth Farm in Plymouth. The name of her Sandwich gallery, Damselfly, is an appropriate metaphor for Gray's continuing emergence. While sitting on the deck with the former owners of her house, a huge dragonfly landed on the railing. "Dragonfly sounded too masculine," she recalls. "Damselfly seemed to fit me. You know what the difference is between a dragonfly and a damselfly? A dragonfly lands with its wings flat, horizontal. A damselfly opens her wings, like a butterfly."