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With a career that spans more than five decades, Erbe is well known in the metropolitan area. Yet, as with all significant artists who have had long, fruitful careers, her work is not monolithic. It shows the sort of trajectory of building on ideas and motifs, new things developing from previous efforts, that is the sign of a truly strong artist. She continues to draw on a repertory of sources, combining and making them her own in ever changing ways.

Among her earliest influences were trips to the circus, a place of wonderment, with her father. Clowns and acrobats in sequins delighted her, while the freak shows both amazed and frightened her. People with strange deformities, smiling and nodding to the crowds as they passed by into the tent are the kinds of memories that lurk behind works like ‘‘Leopard Boy and Friends.”

Expressionist painters like Max Beckmann and Wasily Kandinsky also have been important to her. ‘‘Big Blue” (1997), featuring a clown and a woman with a huge fish, is clearly reminiscent of Beckmann’s mythologies, but with less anguish, more ambivalence and a bit of humor. Last, but certainly not least, are the works of deliberate ‘‘outsiders” like Jean Dubuffet who, in the early 1950s, when Erbe was beginning her career, were praising and imitating the art of children and ‘‘primitives” as uniquely authentic. While Erbe has named Dubuffet as a primary influence, it’s less in his work that she found inspiration than in his search for the primitive in his own psyche, adopting a naïve drawing style and crude application of paint.

With a degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Erbe is no autodidact, but her paintings look like they could have been made by one.

Many of Erbe’s paintings combine the beautiful with the grotesque, and her style may be seen as a variant of the ‘‘magic realism” that remains popular in Latin American galleries where she has exhibited extensively. A number of paintings in the Heineman-Myers exhibit are also distinctly reminiscent of colonial Latin American art. ‘‘Celestial Closet,” a large work painted in acrylic on masonite and wood, has the look of a colonial ‘‘retablo” or altarpiece. Angels and jaguars flank the image of twin ‘‘saints” whose smiling faces rise above the sun faces on their dresses. Erbe has been experimenting with carved and painted frames, some with additions of carved figures that also have a Latin American reference, particularly the little ‘‘Penitente” that looks like a St. Sebastian tied to a tree. Other works, such as ‘‘Devil in Me” and ‘‘Carnival Morte,” combine circus figures with skeletons or skulls, the juxtaposition recalling the traditional symbolism of the ‘‘memento mori.”

From the suite of black ink drawings of worn-out dolls from 2001, to the new small circus pictures with titles like ‘‘Baby’s Bad Dream” and ‘‘Side Show,” Erbe’s work provides an exciting and varied visual experience. Ask to see the scrapbook of clippings that document her career since the ’50s, and the delicate etchings and other works on paper now also in the gallery.

Elyse Harrison, artist owner of Neptune Gallery, has followed up her hugely successful ‘‘Cupidity” show of last February with a new ‘‘Valentine’s Day inspired, but not limited to” invitational called ‘‘Love Birds.” A small group of artists were asked to create works on the theme of lovebirds — however they might interpret that, in media as diverse as there are attitudes about love. I especially liked David Wallace’s new collaged and painted works on wood, each featuring a cut-out bird pasted over pages from old books on exotic birds, and overlaid with other texts and painted additions. Some are rather racy (‘‘Strange Things Folks Swallow”); others are just full of heart-throb (‘‘Warbler”). Also outstanding were three glass works by Michael Janis. ‘‘Fall From Grace,” alluding to the aftermath of love gone bad, shows a bent female figure whose body leaves a negative heart shape in the middle, and two cast glass wings on the outside. The figure is a ‘‘drawing” made from crushed glass powder that is subsequently fired. Janis is a master of this unusual technique, shown also in his two other box works that have tile-like glass surfaces over close-up drawings of faces of women in love’s rapture. The woodcuts of Kirk Woldruff commenting on a love of parrots are fine neo-surrealism, and Harrison’s own funky ‘‘love birds” feature wings bearing the lyrics of great pop love songs.