Oscar Wilde wrote, "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

In his quietly delightful portraits at the downtown gallery Chambers, Randy Moe draws artists and other friends with flourish, fidelity and representational likeness. He captures his subjects' facial creases, the color and shape of their eyes, even the occasional instance of bed hair.

But each of the 17 color-filled yet contemplative faces that Moe draws is also a portrait of the artist, a look into his somewhat pensive state of mind. The fortysomething, strapping painter of clear-cut devastation, Michael Brophy, for example, becomes a strangely boyish and foppish looking dandy wearing a scarf.

That effete David-Hockney- meets-Oscar-Wilde quality defines most of these portraits of men and women. Moe captures his subjects in recessive poses, their eyes usually averted, and in dreamy, lost-in-high-thought gazes. One work, "Richard B.," captures a bespectacled, emo-looking fellow lying on a bed, perhaps contemplating the upper atmosphere of his bedroom. This is a gallery of shy romantics.

The portraits also are well-executed. Moe is a highly skilled draftsman -- only a handful of local artists, including Stephen Hayes, George Johanson and Eric Stotik, can draw the subtle slopes and inclines of the face as well. And he's adept at what Chambers gallery director Eva Lake casually refers to as an updated Expressionist style, creating rich surface contours through thin, swirling slices of color and line.

Many of these portraits have been bought. That's a stark contrast to the works of another portraitist with two shows at separate venues this month -- Gwenn Seemel. Painted in a blunt, chop-socky Cubist style, Seemel's portraits of local politicos and other well-known Portland personalities are deeply accomplished but not nearly as representational or tastefully beautiful as Moe's. Few, if any, of Seemel's commissions were bought by the sitters.

Which brings us to two points about portraiture and Moe's art in particular. People usually want to see a degree of faithfulness, literal likeness, in portraits. That's why photography, with its ability to capture surface representation, long ago usurped painted or drawn portraits as the primary media for portraiture.

But no matter how spontaneous and surface-oriented photographs are, they don't capture the almost palpable feeling of the artist who draws or paints. Look at Moe's two self-portraits, for instance.

The earliest, made in 1985, captures Moe sitting down, a demure, dark-haired romantic who likely listened to Spandau Ballet and The Style Council alone in his room. The second, made this year, presents a bare-chested, gray-haired boy-man confronting the viewer straight on. Much has likely happened to Moe in the 20 years between the portraits -- he's now middle-age, for one. If a good portrait is supposed to represent with feeling, then Moe's two works do that and one better: They capture a space in time.