A year ago, Vicki Walsh exhibited paintings at the Taylor Library in Pacific Beach in which people didn't smile, didn't frown, didn't grimace, didn't open their mouths. They simply looked at the viewer in such a way that a viewer concentrated on the faces (one per canvas) in these handsomely crafted pictures.

She was surprised to discover that some people found them disturbing.

“To me, they were neutral faces,” she says. They're currently in her Pacific Beach studio.

Walsh seems almost fated to concentrate on people as a subject.

“At 12, I was painting faces out of National Geographic. I liked to paint old ones, with craggy skin. I also painted from the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange.”

She was earnest about her art as a teenager and showed work at the Del Mar Fair. She studied painting in college, too, earning her BFA from California State University Long Beach in 1980.

While there, she also did a two-year program in biomedical illustration that proved pivotal to her professional life. Walsh, a longtime resident of Pacific Beach, worked for herself as a forensic medical illustrator, preparing images as evidence for the courtroom. It was lucrative, but in 2000 she left the business behind. Walsh also married for the first time.

She took art history classes at San Diego State University. She went to Vermont to take a course in plein air painting.

“It was wonderful,” Walsh recalls of that time in Vermont. “But some of these artists, as good as they were, were selling their wares (at art festivals) out of their vans or the trunks of their cars. That wasn't for me.”

So, at age 50, she decided to pursue graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute.

“They teach you how to create a body of work and I found a voice there. If you weren't strong, you didn't survive.”

Walsh, now 53, also discovered that being an older student had its advantages.

“Having more experience behind me, I could understand what instructors were doing when they critiqued your work. I wouldn't be as affected.”

In 2006, when she completed her degree, she gave up her two-city life. Within a year, Mark-Elliott Lugo had decided to give her a solo exhibition at the Taylor Library called “Skin Deep.”

Her works require a painstaking process. She draws the subject on canvas, applies a one-color undercoat and then begins applying richer color with thin layers of oil and alkyd. She likens the approach to that of 17th-century Dutch painters.

Walsh is a tough critic of her own work and declares her new paintings to be a big improvement over those she exhibited a year ago. They are immaculately rendered. They are also jarring. The men and women all have mouths open and faces contorted, frozen in the look of a scream. Some look disturbing; others, comical. There is also a geometric pattern in each, which is intriguingly at odds with the dominant subject.

She thinks of this new series less as portraits than “tronies,” a term that 17th-century Dutch painters used to refer to studies of faces in various states of emotion.

The Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara has offered her a solo exhibition, which opens in July. Walsh isn't sure yet whether these new paintings, as yet untitled, will be in that show, but the earlier series will be represented in full.

Two solo shows in two years is a good sign her art is gaining acceptance. But Walsh, who tends to be self-deprecating, says, “I think I have yet to find the audience for my work.”