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John Alexander's range of styles, subject matter and messages is so broad his work defies definition.

According to the Washingto Times, John Alexander is an old-fashioned artist who loves to draw and paint. He represents birds and ducks with the exacting detail of a John James Audubon print, depicts pine forests with the rustic moodiness of a George Inness landscape and slathers pigment onto canvas with the gestural strokes of a Willem De Kooning abstraction.

Mr. Alexander's remarkably wide range of styles and subject matter is reflected through 40 paintings and 27 works on paper on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This selective survey of pieces from the late 1970s to the present, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the first examination of the Texas-born artist's career.

The show is so diverse that it clouds Mr. Alexander's true artistic convictions. Lurching from social satire to landscapes, realism to abstraction, it reveals a restless dabbler who rejects the single-mindedness of better-known creative talents.

Step into one gallery, and you will see a cheerful painting of a watermelon patch, while farther on, you will discover dark, cautionary scribblings about cocaine and alcohol. The flip-flopping work looks as if it were created by several artists so as to satisfy the whims of the changing art market.

Yet Mr. Alexander's paintings and drawings are so well-composed and technically assured that they almost persuade you to forgive his artistic promiscuous-ness. His deep understanding of art history and pictorial structure shines through, even in the most abstract picture. At the same time, this knowledge contributes to a derivativequality in his work by reminding the viewer of the sources the artist has tapped for his style and subject matter.

While lacking a consistent theme, most of the exhibit reflects Mr. Alexander's abiding interest in nature. The 62-year-old artist grew up camping and fishing in countryside outside his hometown of Beaumont, Texas, and now travels the world exploring exotic terrain. Odes to the forests and bayous of his youth (as in "Honky-Tonk Moon") and natural environments experienced while an adult recur throughout the show. The large oil "Glory Bound" combines childhood memories of freight trains rumbling through East Texas and a 1993 trip to the Venezuelan rain forest. It suggests a metaphor for the industrial world's destructive path through pristine wilderness.

In 1979, Mr. Alexander moved from Houston to New York City and began a series of works in the neo-expressionist style popular during the 1980s. The largest and most exuberant work in the show, "I've Been Living in a Hydrogen Bomb," layers vibrant, calligraphic brushwork onto a dark background. This 10-by-22-foot triptych never dissolves into total abstraction but maintains an illusion of deep space, as in the artist's more realistic scenes. A preparatory study in watercolor and ink reveals its roots in an apocalyptic landscape.