He's made 12 books thus far and continues to embrace the form. "Coverage" is a different type of work. It's a cross between poetry and conceptual art, and it's made to be mailed — in installments. He just had his first solo exhibition in a gallery, at Harrington Fine Arts in San Francisco, which included paintings and assorted other works.

Eric Baskauskas, now 23, grew up in Martinez, Calif., northeast of Berkeley. He finished his bachelor's at University of California, San Diego in 2006, and has stayed to work as a graphic designer on campus.

There's even a chance you've seen one of his earlier projects traveling on highways. It's a 1994 Nissan Sentra, with an arching row of buildings and a caricaturish figure filling the passenger side.

His car aside, Baskauskas' art is generally smaller in scale. In "Just Deserts," his newest book, there are abrupt shifts in place and scale. People show up in vast empty spaces, while houses are densely packed on other pages. There is the sense of a world out of tilt, but he isn't overly dramatic about it.

This is true in "Coverage" too. Each of the installments looks like a packet of paint-chip samples, packaged in a folder with a room pictured on its interior. A single color dominates in each — titles are "Meat Red," "Dirt Green" and so forth. On the samples are phrases tinged with commentary instead of the names of colors: "Supply Demands," "Demand Supplies," "Implosionville" and so on. He also likes the link to house paint, which he uses in his work, and to suburban imagery in the chosen images of rooms.

"My work could be heavy-handed, angry and one-dimensional," he says, thinking back to when he first came to college. But his mentors in the art department — Jean Lowe, Matthieu Gregoire and Kim MacConnel — opened his eyes to other approaches.

"They showed me how to inject more mystery and make less of a statement," he says, "that I could mix the poetic and the political."

One comment by Lowe stuck with him in a profound way. Reacting to some of his work, she said, "It doesn't have to be ugly."

Baskauskas embraced this notion and continues to integrate it into his work. Color matters a good deal now; so do recurring visual motifs.

But he remains fascinated with suburban life as a subject.

"What does it mean to be comfortable? That's a question I ask myself and ask in my work.

"The suburbs can be boring, they can lead to apathy, a dulling effect. But I'm ambivalent. I am happy with who I am and part of that comes from growing up in a suburban place. So, I'm ambivalent: How can something so wrong also be so right?"

Baskauskas will likely leave for Los Angeles next year, lured by its sprawling art scene. He still thinks grad school is in his future too, probably for the fall of 2009.

For the moment, he's content to have his first solo exhibition in a gallery. It motivated him to make paintings again; and in style they adhere closely to his books. He has also painted on skateboards and old LP covers.

The imagery is disquieting, but the colors can be bright, almost festive. Baskauskas titled the show "I Feel Fine," but you just know that phrase has an ironic undercurrent.

To find out more about Robert L. Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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