“Every morning I go out in the car and I paint,” says Horowitz. “I get to Route 6 and I either take a left or a right. I generally don’t decide until I’m at the highway.”

Horowitz, 70, first came to Wellfleet in the 1970s as a college student. “I was the boyfriend who was invited for a week, stayed for three, and then married the girl,” he says.

He and his wife, Tami Horowitz, kept coming to Wellfleet, bringing their two children and now grandchildren. “The soul of my family resides in Wellfleet,” he says. He spends about six months of the year here. He also has a house in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and travels in the winter to paint and exhibit his work in South Carolina, California, and Martha's Vineyard.

When he first visited, he painted outside every day, a practice he’s continued.

Evident in this exhibition is his limitless drive to make paintings. He’s prolific, and this show — and to an even greater extent, his studio — is filled with canvases of every size and description. The paintings are mostly of Wellfleet, focusing on the ocean beaches and the areas around Pleasant Point and Mayo Beach.

Horowitz is always looking for new ways to depict the same landscape. “My first day back in Wellfleet, I always go to Mayo Beach to paint,” he says. “It’s a way to gauge where I’m at.” It’s also a chance to have new ideas. “What excites me is the challenge,” he says. “You get to one level, and then you can just go to another level.”

Included in the Cove show are examples of a challenge that has recently engaged him: stretching the definition of what a composition can be. In Panorama With Uncle Tim’s Bridge, Horowitz worked on a long, narrow surface to create a picture that directs the eye over a bridge on the left side of the painting, toward a raised clump of trees in the center, and then over to a fire-engine-red building on the right.

“If you think of Impressionist painting as a moment in time, a panoramic painting is the passage of time,” says Horowitz. The painting evokes the feeling of a slow walk through the landscape and its autumnal colors.

Cottage Moonrise feels more like a distinct moment. This vertical composition is painted in the dramatic, fleeting colors of twilight. "A little slice of life," says Horowitz. A house overlooking Blackfish Creek takes up the bottom third of the painting, which stretches upward revealing a cross-secction of the sky. A moon hangs in the upper left corner. 

“A woman and her husband came over to me,” Horowitz says of the night he made the painting, “and she said, ‘This painting needs the moon.’ I love that kind of thing. I was recalcitrant about it, but then I realized the balance of the moon and the building gives it an emotional context.” He also appreciates comments that inform him about the places he’s painting — especially from kids. “They’re honest,” he says. “If you’re doing a bad job, they’re going to tell you.”

Horowitz traces his own interest in art to a chance encounter with painting as a child. He grew up in Plainview, Long Island, and in the summer he attended a local arts camp. “I loved sculpture, but one year my parents were late signing me up, and the only thing available was painting,” he says. “I ended up throwing the last temper tantrum of my childhood that day.” The painting class, however, proved to be pivotal. “That was it,” he says. “I was hooked.”

He continued painting through high school and college. “My father had a job he hated, and he wanted me to do something that I loved,” says Horowitz. As a teenager, he studied at the Art Students League before attending SUNY Purchase.

After college, Horowitz focused on pastels, often selling his work. He worked for Wolf Kahn, known for his vibrant landscape paintings and pastels executed in loose gestures. Kahn studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown but is most associated with Vermont, where he lived when not in New York City.

“He taught me the special sauce of what it’s like to be a professional artist,” says Horowitz, “and what is expected of you.”

Horowitz is enthusiastic and gregarious. A small table in his studio is covered with watercolor cards that he sends to certain “very special” collectors.

“A collector doesn’t just fall in love with the painting,” he says. “They fall in love with you. They fall in love with the language that you speak in colors and shapes.”

Horowitz’s use of color is one of the most distinctive qualities of his work. He excels at capturing moody, dramatic weather. “I love to go out after it’s rained, and all of a sudden the sun is out, but the sky is still black,” he says.

In Towards Old Wharf the sky is flushed with the colors of twilight: luminous peachy pinks lie on the horizon and murky purples extend above a tree line. The colors in Pleasant Point Reflections are more subdued, but he finds a range of color even in gray, a touch of pinkish purple in the sky, a silvery green in the water.

Horowitz describes what he does as “pulsing the color, or constantly changing it. It gives the piece much more three-dimensionality, and it takes it out of its photographic context,” he says.

This restless, curious energy is what propels Horowtiz out into the landscape every day.

“I don’t believe that the boundaries of landscape painting or of painting in Cape Cod have been reached yet,” he says.