A large work on paper titled "Mt. Washington," at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, inventively references the notoriously fearsome weather atop New England's highest peak. But that's not why the gallery's current three-person exhibition is called "Nor'easter." The reason is simply that artists Terry Ekasala, Rick Harlow and Craig Stockwell are all based in the Northeast, curator Richard Jacobs explained in a phone call. Ekasala — who recently received the second annual Vermont Prize for her work — lives in West Burke, Harlow in Rockingham, and Stockwell in Keene, N.H.

"There's this thing we all share: a different kind of studio time and life, a different relationship to the seasons," elaborated Putney-based painter Jacobs, whom Bundy owners Wendell and June Anderson asked to curate the exhibit.

Geography aside, the exhibiting artists at first appear to have no more in common than oil paint, abstraction and well-established careers. Their works are exceedingly distinctive. But the curator found connections among — and kinship with — the three painters.

"I also like that they're all enigmatic," Jacobs said. "What mattered to me was what would happen when you stood in the middle [of the gallery] and watched to see if they played well together. I felt like that main room was one plus one plus one added up to five."

The Bundy's primary gallery space, with a two-story ceiling and a wall of glass, is a dramatic showroom for large works. Each of the artists was given one of the non-window walls, as well as nooks elsewhere to display smaller paintings.

Stockwell's "Mt. Washington" hangs in the middle, opposite the bank of windows. The 82-by-102-inch piece on paper, in gesso and water pigment, represents the mountain and its hazards. The complex composition includes figurative and abstract elements as well as text.

The outlines of three men on all fours seem to crawl across the bottom of the picture plane, while another man bends and reaches out as if to help them. A couple hovering above might be navigating the snow — or lost. In a phone call, Stockwell explained that he used himself as the model for the figures, with the aid of video and projections.

A swath of bright, translucent blue above the sketched-in mountain stands in cheery contrast to the dire warning printed over the scene in capital letters: "Stop. The area ahead has the worst weather in America," it begins. "Many have died here from exposure, even in the summer. Turn back now if the weather is bad."

That caution is posted on every trail at a certain elevation, Stockwell said, noting that he first hiked the mountain at age 5 and has been there "several times in life-threatening conditions." This narrative piece has to do with family history and the thrill of risk-taking, he said: "I'm intrigued by that sense of mortality."

Viewers don't perceive the artist's personal experiences on Mount Washington in this work, nor do they need to. Stockwell's formal engagement with the piece is captivating enough. He has incorporated linear abstractions into the right and left sides of the image, elements of which are echoed precisely in six separate, smaller geometric works flanking the larger painting. The arrangement suggests an example of what Stockwell terms the "intelligent play" of abstraction.

Those 20-by-16-inch untitled canvases — plus six others hung alongside them — frame the man-versus-mountain drama with strict linearity. Never mind that these geometric studies are pleasingly multihued; the foundational certainty of straight lines, squares and rectangles counters the gut punch of fallibility expressed in Stockwell's central painting. Perhaps we could say "Mt. Washington" shows us coequal neurological responses to a challenge.

In a couple of smaller paintings from his "anomalies" series, Stockwell aims to offset coldly intellectual formalism with what he calls "empathetic expressions" by placing hard-edged and biomorphic forms on the same canvas. In one 20-by-16-inch untitled piece, for example, a black rectangle with a brownish-red frame dominates the center, while a curvaceous orange blob lurks behind it. Above this odd couple, Stockwell layered a flowy blue line in a vaguely floral shape. It's not hard to extrapolate other dichotomies here, particularly masculine/feminine. In his hands, they seem to be working out their differences.

In an artist statement, Stockwell writes that he strives to surprise himself. An attentive observer, too, might be surprised at how his revelations unfold.

Viewers would be hard-pressed to find any straight lines in Ekasala's abstractions. Our pattern-seeking brains are rarely rewarded with the representation of an object — aside from a few pointy triangles that suggest mountains and recurring shapes resembling helmets sans wearers. Ekasala fills her large and smaller canvases mainly with rounded forms in endless variations and tonal relationships — a process that she described as intuitive.

"It's all about form and color," the artist said in a phone call. "I'm trying to be intelligent about this. In the last four or five years, I've gotten to the point where I've really let go. I don't even remember making choices.

"The minute I stop and analyze is when it seems contrived and too thought out," Ekasala added.

A sentence in her artist statement puts it this way: "Letting go and allowing intuition to take over is when the best work happens."

The same could be said for a viewer's response; analyzing is a fool's errand. Ekasala invites our perception to float in the ineffable space where imagination is nourished, everything is new and all things are possible.

Artworks untethered from realism make even description of them difficult. Suffice it to say that Ekasala has developed her own vocabulary of form and color to wondrous effect. An artist who began her career in representational and technical drawing, she has masterfully untrained herself. "The more I went on and the older I got," she said, "[the more] I tried to not try too hard."

Ekasala suggested that, for viewers of her paintings, "Anything that comes from a truth or pure act might just resonate." That notion handily fits Harlow's paintings, as well.

The phrase "something like enlightenment" appears in, of all things, Manohla Dargis' recent New York Times review of the movie Barbie. The distance is vast between bubblegum-pink Barbie Land and Harlow's paintings, yet his work also merits that laudatory descriptor. The words "cosmic," "trippy" and "stunning" apply, too. What comes to mind first when seeing a Harlow canvas, though, is How did he do that?

The answer: with dots. In photographs or from across the room, the large-scale paintings "Moss," "Aji Picante" and "Blue" suggest monochromatic minimalism in green, red and blue, respectively. But as a viewer approaches, the image dissolves into thousands of tiny specks in other colors, even as the dominant color retains its vibratory essence.

Visually, this is startling, like a moment of epiphany. Perhaps a better analogy is seeing the Milky Way through the clarifying lens of a telescope rather than with the naked eye. (To Galileo Galilei in 1610, was that not something like enlightenment?)

Alongside a thriving artistic career that began in the Boston area, Harlow has spent extensive time over three decades with Indigenous communities in South America. Last week, he responded to a WhatsApp call after descending a mountain in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. He has been assisting tribal elders in the recording and preservation of traditional practices, such as sacred ceremonies, throughout the so-called Heart of the World. Harlow dubbed it "spiritual acupuncture" for the Earth.

Harlow's paintings have long had a mystical quality, abetted by the "60 to 100" shamanic ceremonies in which he said he has participated using the psychoactive plant ayahuasca.

"It's a great aid to perceive vibration and frequency at a gut level," he allowed, saying his consciousness has developed over the years. Eventually, he dispensed with representation in his landscape and semi-abstracted paintings in favor of sheer color.

"For me, it's the closest I can come to being able to express nature, energy and vibration," Harlow said.

The artist's technique sounds like barely controlled chaos: He dips his brush in paint and then knocks it against another tool, sending a spatter of color to the canvas. To achieve the illusion of a monochromatic work, he uses more of one chosen hue, particularly in the center of the piece. In the 72-by-108-inch "Blue," for example, an amorphous field of cobalt gradually edges into violet and blue-black. Again, at close range, the color is not solid but an incalculable number of tiny specks, layer on layer.

"His work has moved into the realm of painting energy," Harlow's partner, Laurie Rabut, said in a phone call. "Everything is alive. He wants to bring that experience to people — the energetic element of everything in nature.

"His experiences with the plant medicine have been instrumental in the way he experiences the cosmos and his place in it," Rabut continued, "and his work demonstrates that."

"I think a lot of things that happen with art are serendipitous, and this was one of them," curator Jacobs said of "Nor'easter." But it's no accident that he assembled artworks that require — and merit — deep looking and thinking. Viewers could reap mind-bending rewards.