Bryant Park, a painting by Providence artist Brian Shure, is part of an exhibit of Shure’s work at Rhode Island College.

Sometimes being conservative may be the most radical thing an artist can do.

That admittedly counterintuitive thought came to mind recently after visits to a pair of Providence gallery shows: “Brian Shure: Recent Paintings” at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery and “Contrasting Images: Works by Stephen Fisher and Sam Duket” at the Lenore Gray Gallery.

Both Shure, a painter and printmaker who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Fisher, an all-star draftsman who teaches at Rhode Island College, make art the old-fashioned way.

In Shure’s case, that means producing street scenes and urban studies that brim with finely observed details — the shambling, self-possessed gait of kids on their way home from school, for example, or the pearlescent glint of office tower windows shimmering in the morning sun.

Fisher, meanwhile, seems to have the artistic equivalent of perfect pitch.

A perennial winner of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts’ drawing fellowship, he creates dizzyingly complex still lifes using a handful of basic ingredients — a half-shaded kitchen window, a tile countertop, a few toys and other props. The results, all of which employ the same palette of sooty blacks and grays, are so beautifully and precisely rendered that they border on the surreal.

What Shure and Fisher have in common is the same thing that sets them apart from so many of their contemporaries: respect for tradition, a high level of craftsmanship and an obsessive curiosity about the world around them. Nowadays, that’s a pretty radical combination.

By now, local art fans should be well acquainted with both artists’ work.

Shure, for example, has exhibited regularly over the past few years, including a series of large-scale streetscapes and architectural studies that showed a keen grasp of traditional composition and perspective. More recent shows have focused on works inspired by Shure’s trips to Italy and China.

In his latest paintings, Shure continues to explore the modern urban landscape. But his views of Providence, New York and Pittsburgh also have something new: people.

A good example is Museum Steps, a sweeping view of the front entrance of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. As anyone who’s visited the Met can attest, the museum’s front steps attract a colorful mix of people, ranging from exhausted museum-goers to fashionably dressed New Yorkers to wide-eyed tourists with their fanny packs and Big Apple T-shirts.

It’s a scene that Shure captures in impressive fashion, filling the lower part of his canvas with finely observed vignettes of people sitting and standing in small groups, talking on cell phones and gawking at other passersby. The rest of painting, meanwhile, is dominated by the soaring columns of the Met’s neoclassical façade. The resulting contrast between art and life — between the gray hulk of the museum and the multicultural crowd on its steps — makes the painting work.

Other paintings celebrate similar moments of urban poetry.

In Verdi Square, a group of female joggers waits for the street light to change, their lithe yet languid poses echoing classical depictions of the Three Muses. In Bryant Park, light filtering down from a canopy of trees transforms an everyday scene of New Yorkers sitting and strolling into a glittering Pointillist landscape. In PPG Plaza I, jets of water from an outdoor water-park erupt into swirling plumes worthy of an Abstract Expressionist painting.

In each case, Shure celebrates the beauty and variety of everyday experience, even as he challenges himself to register that experience as accurately and as possible. Granted, it’s an old-fashioned approach. Still, it has produced some of Shure’s best work to date.

Fisher, meanwhile, shows regularly in Boston and Providence, where his formidable technical skills and unusual approach to still life (think Pixar meets Piranesi) have earned him a devoted following.

Like many still life specialists, Fisher typically employs a small group of objects, which he adds to and rearranges from drawing to drawing. These include a collection of vintage toys, an antique hourglass; a small globe and a striped cookie tin.

While that might not sound like much, when these objects are combined with the other staples of Fisher’s work — notably a window that casts tiger-striped shadows over everything and a tile countertop that reflects both the window and the shapes and patterns of the objects placed on it — all kinds of strange things can happen.

A drawing called Imperial Walkers, for example, combines the usual array of vintage toys with a pair of “walkers” — contemporary wind-up toys that suggest a swarm of mechanized spiders. As in many of Fisher’s drawings, there’s an implied contrast between past and present — in this case, between the charming antique toys and their coolly minimalist counterparts.

But the real genius of Fisher’s work is the way he pulls everything — the thin, angular shapes of the “walkers,” the rounder forms of the older toys, the slanting shadows cast by the window, the diamond patterns of the tiles — into an elegant (if slightly surreal) whole. Indeed, Fisher’s work often recalls that of another master of light and shadow: Johannes Vermeer.

Other drawings suggest that Fisher is expanding his artistic horizons.

Swimming with the Infinite, for example, features the familiar array of toys and antiques, but adds something new: a carved bodhisattva. Another drawing, Vanitas, features what appears to be the rib cage of a large animal. It’s also a more spatially complex work, with a deeper background and a wider frame of vision than most of the show’s other drawings.

Fisher’s work is nicely complemented by that of Sam Duket, another RISCA fellowship winner whose painted-wood constructions also play with notions of space an perspective. A work called Primary Secondary, for example, features a pair of overlapping wood sheets, each decorated with a different grid pattern. The result suggests a fender-bender between two windows.

Another piece — the delightfully titled St. George’s Onions — is even more complicated. Like many of Duket’s works, it explores traditional sculptural ideas of inside/outside, open/closed, solid/void while adding a healthy dose of visual wit and humor.

“Brian Shure: Recent Paintings” runs through Nov. 26 at the Bannister Gallery, Roberts Hall, Rhode Island College, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Providence. Gallery hours: Mon.-Wed. and Fri. 11-5 and Thurs. noon-9. Contact: (401) 456-9765 or visit on the Web at www.ric.edu/bannister.

“Contrasting Images: Works by Stephen Fisher and Sam Duket” runs through Dec. 18 at the Lenore Gray Gallery, 15 Meeting St., Providence. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 10-4:30. Contact: (401) 274-3900.

bvansicl@projo.com