I've never seen trees like Grant William Thye's before. The textural and layered brushstrokes commonly used in rendering trees are replaced by bright, flat, organic shapes outlined in calligraphic swooshes. The result is a fresh approach to the genre that's part classical landscape, part abstraction, and part cartoon.

This freshness and presence of a clear style are apparent with all three artists on display through February 28 in Quad City Arts' gallery at the Quad City International Airport. Thye, Angela Dieffenbach, and Karina Cutler-Lake employ traditional genres as vehicles for novel imagery.

David Johnson's vase is missing large chunks.

In the current Quad City Arts exhibit at the Quad City International Airport, the vase Missing Pieces #7 is symmetrical but for the voids that appear to have formed naturally through the growth and decay of its wood. Their jagged, random edges echo the blotchy rings of the wood grain, yet Johnson has varnished the entire surface, making it seem at once broken and new. The vase is not suitable for its ostensible purpose and seems to question the relationships between craft, aesthetics, and functionality. It's a striking use of the medium of wood.

The show, running through December, features two bodies of work: selections from the Quad Cities Wood Turners Club and mixed-media works by Jeff Stevenson. While the wood turners employ a relatively restrictive technique - modified wood in a functional context - Stevenson uses a massive range of media, from magazines to encaustic. The two components of the exhibit are different, but they both transcend the limitations of their methods: The best of the wood works (such as Johnson's vase) have visual and technical depth, and Stevenson's strongest pieces gel thematically and visually even as the variety of materials threatens chaos.

One might expect a collection of images featuring the personification of death to be morose, dark, depressing, and grotesque, but in the new Figge Art Museum exhibit Dancing Towards Death, many of the works are instead humorous or thoughtful. The show is more about the uses of death-related imagery (and Death as a character) than death itself, with the skeletal manifestation conjuring a variety of moods and themes.

The show (which runs through January 9) was mostly drawn from a private collection and was supplemented with work from the Figge's collection. The art-history connoisseur will appreciate the inclusion of big names such as Albrecht D?rer, Rembrandt, and Käthe Kollwitz, but the exhibit also features unknown craftspeople, such as the artisans who created Books of Hours. And the accessibility of both the theme and the imagery will provide a meaningful experience for the casual art viewer.