Two well-known eastern Connecticut artists who find images within themselves are exhibiting paintings at Norwich Arts Center this month.

Rita Dawley, of Uncasville, has been painting compulsively since the 1950s, when, though sent to Yale to study nursing, she sneaked off to go to art school — Paier College in New Haven — instead.

Dawley’s recent work tends to be hallucinogenic patchworks of odd angles and rectangles populated by bizarre beings that could be aliens from another world or animals of Incan imagination.

People ask her where she finds these images. She says she doesn’t know. They just come from inside her and appear on canvas or paper surfaces in breathtaking amalgams of color.

Blaney Harris, of Ledyard, a graduate of Boston University School of Art, has been painting splashy abstracts since he retired from a 20-year hitch in the Navy.

He gets the same question Rita Dawley gets: where does his art come from? And though his art is quite different, his answer is the same. He isn’t getting it from outside himself. The world doesn’t look like what he paints.

Somehow — and he isn’t sure how — the vague shapes and smears of color reflect something inside him.

He certainly didn’t get them from inside submarines. After graduating from B.U., he saw the futility of trying to earn a living from art, so he joined the Navy. He spent most of the next couple decades diddling with navigation computers in a drab can under water. No nature. No beaches. No rain. And no art. He never told anybody that he used to be an artist.

He was still an artist. It was still inside him.

Once back on land, he took it up again. His subjects tended to be nautical or seaside landscapes, the kinds of things that sell well along the Connecticut shore. But in 2018, he suffered a heart attack. He did some thinking, the kind one thinks at death’s door.

He decided he was going to paint what he felt like painting. He was going to paint what he felt, and what he felt was something arguably the opposite of life in a submarine.

Meanwhile, Rita Dawley was raising five kids and a husband while working to make enough cash to keep her in art supplies. Her work attracted a lot of attention as she explored shapes, colors, topics and technics.

Her paintings evolved into something like quilts of scattered patches that flow with progressions of color, strange beasts, odd perspectives and bold surprises.

She’s 85 years old and still surprising. Lately she’s been carving wood blocks that she uses to press out prints on paper that she then colors and cuts out and pastes onto the surface of a painting. They beg exploration.

One could look at her paintings every day for years and see more each time. One cannot help but wonder where the mishmash of color and unparalleled images come from. They are not of this world. They come from a 1950s housewife who sees what other people can’t.

The exhibit of these artists’ remarkable work can be see at NAC, 60 Broadway in Norwich, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 4 p.m., until the end of the September.