The holiday season has gone out with a whimper or a bang, depending on how you celebrate it at your house, leaving the long winter months to look forward to.

The folks at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery are set to fend off the winter blahs with two cheerful exhibits designed to put some light and laughter back in the picture.

“Making Light of January” features the whimsical, comical and colorful art of Port Townsend artist Max Grover, and “Comic Relief,” features works by eight artists with “creative” senses of humor.

“Comic Relief” artists are Debbie Fecher, Nina Laden, Ellen Miffitt, John Paul Morgan, Lynn de Nino, Shane Miller and Joe and Elida O’Brien.

Victoria Josslin, BAC director of education and information, said of Grover’s work, “Some day someone will write a PhD dissertation on Max’s work and its ‘sophisticated faux-naif Surrealism,’ but for now we can relax and enjoy his happy colors and the unpredictable turns of his imagination.”

That’s artspeak for, if you have an art degree from some fancy university you can interpret his art on one level, but if you just like the bright colors and cute characters, that’s OK, too.

Grover’s work is that type of so-simple-it-has-to-be-sophisticated art. For example, “Sacked Cat” features the eyes and tail of a black cat poking out from a yellow-brown paper bag, sitting on a red table with a blue background.

“Siren and Slice” depicts a chubby (or “Rubenesque”) mermaid lounging on a rock in the sea, holding a slice of watermelon. In “Night Off” another mermaid lounges on a bed eating popcorn and watching TV while goldfish swim in a bowl on the nightstand.

“Cookie of Wonder,” which will be in the BAC show, depicts an iced animal cookie, sort of a polka-dotted blob with four legs, looking balefully at a moon in a star-filled sky. That is, if a cookie with no eyes can look baleful.

Other works in the show include “The Running of the Tubs,” “Truck Load of Joe” and “Still Life in Parking Lot.”

Grover lives in Port Townsend with his wife Sherry and two inspirational cats, Oreo and Cheddar. His primitive (as in American Primitive, not caveman primitive) style is well suited to illustrations for children’s books, greeting cards, posters and promotional material for organizations. He designed both the Port Townsend Film Festival and Olympic Music Festival posters and brochures.

If there’s a child in the house, chances are there’s at least one book on the shelf illustrated by Grover. Some popular titles include an illustrated “The Night Before Christmas,” “Max’s Wacky Taxi Day” and “The Accidental Zucchini: An Unexpected Alphabet.”

He also teaches art and speaks publicly on art, as well as running the Max Grover Gallery in Port Townsend.

Bainbridge Island artist Debbie Fecher is known for her bizarre human-based sculptures which make people smile. Her popular “Shakers,” one-of-a-kind saltshakers, are sold at galleries across the United States.

“With my art, I am trying to give a visual image to the emotional feelings we all share,” she said. “My art has become a body of work that is chronicling what it is to be human.”

One gallery said of Seattle printmaker John Paul Morgan: “While he is equally masterful in his sophisticated and detailed renderings of tropical fish, frogs and butterflies, it is his dramatic, charismatic interpretations of such exotic birds as cranes, herons, hawks, ibis and egrets that are truly his cachet.”

Tacoma artist Lynn de Nino works in hybridized concrete to create unique animal sculptures.

“Because animals are beautiful (even the ugly ones), can be so easily personified, are silly at times, have curves, and come in such a variety of packages — I am constantly, and permanently inspired,” she said. “I thrive on puns, and often work word plays into the theme of a piece in order to provoke a thought, or to instill ‘fun’ — a feeling of playful spirit — and if you smile, I feel I’ve done my job.”

Feel free to smile, point and laugh at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery dual exhibit. It will help relieve the winter blues.

“Making Light of January” and “Comic Relief” run through Jan. 31 at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery, 151 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island.

There is a reception for the artists during First Friday, 6-8 p.m. Jan. 6. wu