It’s easy to view Elizabeth Enders’ paintings as sketch-like — spontaneous and simple. With her use of large blocks of color and basic shapes, she must get that a lot.

In reality, seeing her work is at first like seeing the outside of an apartment building: Inside is the lobby, and only then, admission to the living spaces — some of them sparely decorated, for sure, but rich in artistic and personal vision.

Enders has fittingly titled her current exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum and simultaneously at Real Art Ways in Hartford “Come in!”

“Come in” to landscapes, seascapes and botanical drawings in sizable oils on linen or in smaller watercolors, the work of the past decade or so of a career begun in the 1960s. The segment at Real Art Ways reaches further back into her earlier work as well.

Now a resident of New York City and Waterford, Elizabeth Enders has deep New London roots. Her father, Francis F. McGuire, was a prominent attorney and a director of The Day. Her mother, Helen Connolly McGuire, who died in 2010 at the age of 101, was a patron of the arts. Elizabeth, born in 1939, graduated from Connecticut College and has served on its Board of Trustees. She has Hartford connections, too, through her husband, Anthony Enders, whose prominent family, she says, would greet the young couple with a hearty “Come in!” that inspired her artistic meditations on vista and interior, hospitality offered and hospitality enjoyed.

At the Lyman Allyn, where Enders also exhibited in 2009, a stroke of artistic hospitality serves as a vestibule to the exhibition, which occupies four galleries on the museum’s second floor.

The hospitable entry is in the tiny Hazlewood Gallery, offering a brief, soundless slide show of pages from legal pads, sketchbooks and torn paper — whatever Enders had handy when something caught her imagination. Some sketches date back 25 years, but Lyman Allyn Director D. Samuel Quigley says the slide show was the idea of the artist fairly late in the preparation of the exhibition.

It’s a good one. A few minutes spent with the solo elements that then appear in the paintings is like a pre-concert lecture pointing out the major themes in the symphony to come.

In the slide show are maps and charts and mounds, trees and seas and, most enlightening to the viewer, the genesis of the hashmarks that will morph into words, red crosses, boots on the ground and other figures in the paintings.

Missing from the sketches, however, is what happens when Enders gets serious with paint, in particular, blue.

“Language/Poem/Harbor/Sky,” a major work owned by Brown Brothers Harriman and Co., is a second entree to understanding this artist’s work.

The matrix of the world in Elizabeth Enders’ paintings is a certain shade of blue — true blue. It could be sky, it could be oceanic, but it is neither airy nor fluid. Thick layers of oil paint make a solid ground. “L/P/H/S” has a blue field, possibly sky but perhaps the water of the harbor, if the vantage point is from above, rather than from shore.

In this painting from 2008, the hashmarks are not dots, as they are in series of watercolors done a year later, nor coffee beans nor crosses and letters, as they would become shortly. Mostly they merge into a brightly colored scrawl.

Language and poetry consist of symbols when written and sound when spoken. The painting suggests that the symbols are both. Tone of color might be tone of voice — language, a poem.

Land- and seascapes predominate in the exhibition’s large galleries. For examples of how images from the slide show sketchbooks made it into finished works, look for the ship in the watercolor “Ocean I, series iii” from 2014 and the curious mound of wriggly squiggles in “Eden/Memorandum of Agreement II,” done in oil between 2010 and 2012.

Elizabeth Enders “has mastered numerous genres” in the words of the show’s curator, Charlotta Kotik, curator emerita of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, botanicals being one of the most current.

These are not botanical paintings in the sense of precision drawings of stamens and pistils and every thorn. Enders, it seems, strives to get to the “itness” of the plant, as in two colored pencil versions of “Dusty Miller” done in 2014 that together capture how one seemingly familiar leaf seems right both this way — and that.

In the botanical paintings and drawings, an organic green joins and sometimes replaces the signature blue. Some of these works are diminutive, like the 2007 watercolor series, “Tree,” and some are real-life huge, notably the 2014 “Banana Leaves,” done in oil on linen. Look for “Banana Leaves” as a highlight of the show.

A majority of the works in the exhibition come from the collection of the artist and her family, meaning this is a fairly rare opportunity to “come in” and see what Elizabeth Enders has been painting.

l.mcginley@theday.com

Twitter: @TheDay_Lisa

IF YOU GO

What: "Come In! Elizabeth Enders Recent Work"

Where: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St., New London; and Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St. No.1, Hartford

When: Through Jan. 3, 2016. Lyman Allyn: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sun. 1-5 p.m.; RAW: 2-9 p.m. daily.

How much: Free at Lyman Allyn on the first Saturday of the month and always free to New London residents. Otherwise, $10 per adult, $7 per senior and student over 18; $5 per child. Free at RAW.

More information: Lyman Allyn: (860) 443-2545; RAW: (860) 232-1006