Oil painter's scenes displayed in bold strokes

There’s impressionism, and expressionism, but people really should talk about “juicyism,” because that’s what works for Chris Kappmeier.

Kappmeier grew up in Jersey City and now lives in Lyndhurst, in a painting-stuffed house (canvasses along the walls, the stairs, under the furniture) with a kitchen floor covered in oil paint drips.

Recently he went back to work driving a delivery truck in Manhattan — there are a number of angry blobs depicting New York City traffic in his new show, “Bold Strokes,” at the Morris Museum — but manipulating thick pools of translucent oils beneath thin spools of threadlike color is his real vocation.

“He looks much younger than he is,” associate curator Angela Sergonis says of the stocky, tattooed, buzz-cut and 40-ish Kappmeier, who does all his work on-site, with his subject before him and the plein-air whistling about his ears. That helps give the work its immediacy. Because painting the way Kappmeier paints is not about finding the right detail, or the subtle color shift in light from shadow to darkness. It’s not about referencing other artworks, either, though he has kept a paint box with a Vincent Van Gogh self-portrait taped to the top.

It’s about relating to a scene right in front of him, and reproducing it in quick, thick layers.

You can see what we mean in “Arthur’s Steakhouse Hoboken” (2007) or “Washington & 4th, Hoboken” (2010): Kappmeier has set up his easel across the street, framed the picture between a strip of cloud-flecked sky at the very top and the dark asphalt lined with lumpy cars at the bottom, and just quickly lays in swatches of paint through the middle of it all.

He lays down slabs of paint, then takes the end of his brush and traces through the lines of brickwork or cast-iron railing that emphasize the perspective. When it hums, the picture rhymes with reality as if it had been seen through an uneven, distorting lens, the trees and buildings flickering as if in a flame.

Kappmeier paints so thickly at times that you wonder if dusting the pictures could be a problem. Flowers stand out in relief a quarter-inch deep, and those wonderful cars he paints, their automobile patinas made of lozenges of paint squeezed directly out of the tube, sometimes look like shelves on the canvas.

The best paintings — “NYC Skyline: View From the Meadowlands, Conservation Center” (2006), “Hoboken Taxi Stand” (2010) and “Brooklyn Bridge, Rainy Night” (2010) — take the speed and crash it into the moment. There’s a banana-shaped egret standing like a half-finished ghost in “Skyline,” and the conga line of taxis in “Hoboken” seem to shimmer, as if their engines were all running. You’re supposed to feel them, not see them.

Van Gogh and expressionism do hover somewhere above and behind Kappmeier’s work, but there’s another ghost in it too — that of one-time art star of the ’80s Chuck Connelly. Connelly has some of Kappmeier’s determination to make a picture out of anything — you could sit either man down in front of a view, no matter how unpromising, and they would charge in painting and ultimately find the picture there. Beset by righteous independence (and a certain fondness for alcohol), Connelly has burned more bridges than Kappmeier has even crossed, but the older artist is a juicy painter too, a lover of oil paint laid on thick as plaster, creamier than cake frosting.

Juiciness will be with us as long as oils because the medium is a kind of tiny lens, the illusion of depths it is capable of reproducing imitated by the stuff itself. But mentioning Connelly in this context is both revealing and a red flag. The abandon with which Kappmeier pursues the feel of a picture seems wholly male — no doubt there are women who paint very thickly, but the headlong rush into notional space, reckless and almost blind, that marks Kappmeier’s art feels like force, not sensation.