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"Kandinsky" (1983) by Milton Glaser is on view at Stony Brook Southampton's Avram Gallery.

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Ignoring for a moment the stylistic dissimilarities, there are nevertheless rather interesting parallels to be drawn between the Milton Glaser exhibition at the Avram Gallery at Stony Brook Southampton and the Charles Waller show at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett.

The most immediate correspondence derives from the two artists’ mutual history in the field of graphic design and illustration. Mr. Waller’s illustrations in publications such as The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and Esquire have won numerous awards, and Mr. Glaser is, well, Milton Glaser, designer of such iconographic images as the “I Love NY” heart image and the poster of Bob Dylan that at one point graced the walls of almost every dorm room in America.

It is perhaps as a result of this vocational connection that, even as Mr. Waller’s works reflect his own entertainingly irreverent perspective and Mr. Glaser’s stretch in myriad stylistic directions, each nevertheless offers evidence of the importance of illustration, manifesting what Mr. Glaser once referred to as “the primacy of drawing as a means of engaging the world and understanding what you’re looking at.”

What makes this dedication to the intricacies of line and shade so powerful is that neither artist could be thought of as a mere illustrator, with both instead making the illustrative element subordinate to their works’ conceptual underpinnings and using technique solely as a means of allowing ideas to transcend the images themselves.

The exhibition of Mr. Glaser’s works is titled “Seeing Things” and consists of watercolors, drawings, prints, Giclees, and sketchbooks created over a span of 50 years. The artist focuses in many of the works on a sort of emotional portraiture. Using line, color, and space to illuminate more than the mere surface of his subjects, he structures interactions to conjure moods and psychological sensations, offering the viewer insights into implied narratives while also creating visual rhythms that help to guide the viewer through the work.

In “Tattoo” (offset lithograph, 1980), for example, the image is an overhead view of a Japanese tattoo artist bending over to work on an intricate pictorial design. Contrasting the simple lines that delineate the un-inked portions of the characters’ bodies with the wildly expressive and colorful works that adorn their physiques, the artist is able to generate a juxtaposition of positive and negative space that doesn’t simply add to the narrative flow, it creates it.

This methodology of using motifs to construct the framework from which a particular piece impacts upon the viewer is also apparent in portraits throughout the exhibition. In “Kandinsky” (Giclee print, 1983), and “Edvard Munch” (colored inks, dyes, and pencils, 1983), among other works, this technique is at work in the inclusion of stylistic designs associated with each subject, such as playful geometrics from the former’s Bauhaus period or Munch’s brooding and strangely hypnotic phallic imagery.

This use of art historical iconography that is both serious and whimsical is also used to great effect in “Olympia and Ollie” (silkscreen, 1974) in which the artist re-creates Manet’s famous painting, “Olympia,” echoing the original’s measure of voluptuous eroticism. At the same time, in the inclusion of bizarre and surreal imagery such as a weirdly postured cat, a slave holding wallpaper patterns, and a giant flying insect, the artist also evokes surrealist collage novels such as Max Ernst’s “Semaine de Bonte.”

The exhibition of works by Milton Glaser at Stony Brook Southampton’s Avram Gallery continues through September 12.

Interestingly, in spite of their absence in the pieces in this exhibition, Mr. Glaser has always emphasized the importance of language and words in reflecting his design concepts in much of his graphic work, even at one point stating that “I think words are images: I don’t see a separation between them.”

This idea becomes particularly apt in considering many of the pieces in Charles Waller’s exhibition at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett, in which the artist uses literary elements as visual foils within compositions that are fraught with emotional significance while at the same time conveying the artist’s dry and entertaining sense of humor.

The exhibition is titled “Communiqué” and features many of the antique tools, toys and antique materials Mr. Waller collects, matched with the artist’s masterful draftsmanship and drawing abilities. The amalgamation of the two creates images that are simultaneously whimsical, satirical, and even, at times, sensitively romantic.