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Upon entering the home studio of Greensboro artist Michael Northuis, one will find a most colorful sculpture.

It's a jagged cone of unused oil paint piled a foot and a half tall that looks like a vivid, lit-up Christmas tree.

But for Northuis, it's not a piece of art - it's just his attempt to do something for the environment.

"Sometimes I have to use paint with heavy metal pigment in it that's very toxic," say Northuis, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate. "When I clean my palette up, I don't want to dump it into the sink or put it into the environment at all, so I just scrape it into a pile here and clean my brushes."

That's not to say all of Northuis' creations are simply byproducts of a conscientious artist. The art he creates has an energetic, almost youthful power. In several of his paintings, Northuis uses his brushes to craft peculiar landscapes filled with wildly humorous assemblies of colorful and abstract characters: A blue man cradling a pilsner glass of beer, a topless Mayan queen handcuffed to a cowboy and a matador playing a banjo.

Northuis' simple compositions of complex figures will be featured in "eye Cons," a new art show featuring 24 paintings and drawings he created in the past six years. They'll be shown until Aug. 30 at 5ive & 40rty art gallery in Winston-Salem.

The title "eye Cons" is a humorous riff on the iconic religious paintings of yore, many of which partially inspired this newest exhibit.

"Some of my images are full of plays on older icon images that come from religious paintings," Northuis says. "They're not anti-religious paintings, just some of the cherubs and stuff were kind of hard to take seriously."

While the artist believes it's very important to find something different with every piece he creates, there were several unifying themes that surfaced in his newest show.

"I try not to be repetitious," Northuis says. "But there are overarching themes that keep coming back, and a lot of that has to do with male-female relationships."

Voyeurism is another recurring motif in Northuis' "eye Cons." Several paintings feature men and women in various states of undress. But Northuis doesn't consider the nudity to be pornographic as much as a healthy sexual curiosity.

"I teach a life-drawing class, and I've seen a lot of nude bodies -- female and male," Northuis says. "There's definitely a curiosity there, and I don't think that's good that the culture suppresses that kind of natural curiosity."

At 58, Northuis' most visible attribute is his ability to compose images with raw, fantastic zeal, a quality some have mistaken for a younger artist.

"Somebody met me for the first time ever after seeing my paintings at an art show," says Northuis, laughing. "I don't think they were trying to insult me at all, but they said they thought I'd be younger."

The secret to maintaining vitality in his work could lie in Northuis' diverse range of influences. The artist cites eclectic derivations from African and pre-Columbian sculpture, to early Greek and Renaissance art, Roman frescoes and even Mad Magazine.

"I don't think it's in my personality to sort of rest on my laurels," Northuis says. "I look at a lot of art, and I see a lot of great artists that have done a lot of great things, and I still feel like I've got a lot of room for growth .

"There's a lot of artists that I've worked with who seem to have reached a certain point and seem to be satisfied, and to me, that doesn't compute."

Joe Scott is a freelance contributor. Contact him at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.