It's five p.m. and the gallery's buzzing a bit. Folks unfamiliar with Sean Beavers and his work are trying to guess if the artist's arrived. A moussed-up gent seems a likely candidate, though some gravitate to a demure lad in black leather sipping white wine. Meanwhile Beavers is outside, tall and lean, bronzy-auburn haired with a spike of goatee. Because the front of the Anderson-Soule Gallery is all glass, there's an inner/outer dynamic. His back against a classical column, he's looking in and gathering his thoughts. He'll speak a bit about his work tonight, and he's a little nervous. Inside, airy comments, greetings, quips and murmurs fill the gallery: "Oh, he's departing from the still life." "Sean's trying something new." "I recognize Long Sands. Isn't that near the saltwater taffy store?" "I know that rock in Rye that looks out to the Shoals." From outside, Sean sees our heads nod, our lips move, as we glance at paintings and then each other. Later inside, when you meet his eye, he's got a ready smile; he's composed.

His new work is not a departure. Beavers has painted myriad subjects: portraits complex and illustrative, concise still lifes, and landscapes. In a recent show called "Minumental" (size limit: 2 by 2 inches) he offered a matchbook realistic enough to make one reach for a cigarette, anticipating the sulfur flash of the first strike. "Whispers From the Voice of the Sky," this new show, is as large as the other was small. It holds stretches of sand and shoreline, deltas, bays and bodies of water, and cloudscapes of meteorological precision. This is a first in that it's a series of large-scale canvases. Ten small studies share the gallery with the 10 larger works they helped bring into being. "I'd done two or three landscapes at different times, but a couple of years ago, I decided to do a series of large scale images of clouds," Beavers says in an interview a few days later. Seacoasters and beach denizens will recognize the watery "terrain" from Kennebunk down to Rye.

Asked if he's studied clouds formally and knows their names, Beavers invokes a favorite writer and naturalist, Barry Lopez, paraphrasing, "It's far more interesting to know the thing than its name." He continues, "I have this thing for being with the thing and not with 'me.' I mean, ever since I was a little kid I've been fascinated with clouds." His "being with the thing, not with me" feels like a transcendental notion, and indeed the paintings are peaceful, serene, enlightening, or poignant; their emotional landscapes are acquiescent, allowing the audience interpretive leeway.

In "Distant Hiding Place" a flat-bottomed cumulus cloud pregnant with water vapor sits above an ebb tide-carved delta of sand. Water flows seaward, and the cloud's and water's kinetics mimic each other. Aptly nicknamed mare's tails (clouds of high-flying ice crystals that look like the tails of proud galloping horses) repeat the shape that the water's meander cuts in the sand. Undulant ripples of water tumble their reverse image in the sand they flow over, mirroring long graceful curls of waves breaking farther out.

Over the last five or six years, Beavers says, he practiced a lot of painting outdoors in natural conditions with natural light "until finally I'd done enough studies and felt like I'd built up enough of a body of knowledge to try to do this series." Because clouds and water often behave similarly, it's wonderful that "after being out there, you get to see how patterns in nature repeat on different scales." The smaller studies are fun to compare with the larger works; they're relaxed and sketchy, less modulated and with more saturated colors.

A dark seaside day's born in "Lovely Thunder," and you can almost smell the rain coming. Kennebunk's smoky gray skies and verdant tidewater grasslands are where the interplay of salt and fresh waters create a brackish backwater. At slack tide, ripple and shimmer scud the surface of the water. It's hard to place yourself, so you feel as if aloft, hovering at ease.

In "Secrets" you have a cloud's eye, a virtual primer of layers of cloud formations in a big sky: the lovely vertical development of a cumulo-nimbus cloud mass, storm darkened and cottony; an approaching weather front with stratus clouds in even layers; alto-cumulus wisps of sparkly, high-flying ice crystals. The sky is delicately shaded from baby to robin's egg to cerulean blue, the clouds meticulously rendered in delicate grays, ambers, whites and sepias. The shades and gradations are exquisite, and you get to see, as one observer remarks, "how clouds do that." The thing writ large in the sky becomes accessible at close range, and yet retains its magical qualities.

Drawing sky and water are extremely complex. Beavers talks about water-watching at the beach, trying to understand the physics of the natural world, breaking it into a tangible way to see. "I'll be seeing into the water as its own color. It's reflecting the sky. It's moving, and there are many different planes and angles. And it's reflecting any objects between it and the sky," he describes. Add the roll of waves, their foam, complex shorelines, the way water magnifies and sparkles, and you've an awful lot of considerations and painterly choices to make.

And so I ask about his choice to exclude certain subject matter. There's not a single white heron in the marsh, not a gull in sight, not a human footprint in the sand, not a dog at the beach, no sails set on horizons, no lobster boats nor their fluorescing buoys. His shorelines are undeveloped. "I wanted to present images free of any distractions. By consciously subtracting human distractions you can just be there, with the images," Beavers explains. And this, I think, is how he's mediated for us this meditative space. We're outside looking at the world and invited to look (and listen) in.