If we sometimes turn to comfort food during periods of stress, we may also turn to comfort aesthetics.

After all, we don’t always want to be over-stimulated by challenging work; sometimes serene visual anchors are required to help ground us. Especially outdoors.

That’s the thinking behind recent work by Bainbridge artists George Little and David Lewis, who have mounted their first solo show in four years at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts.

“These are challenging times,” Lewis said. “And we want to respond to that with a body of work that is familiar, but reflective of our transitions.”

The show, so titled “Transitions,” reprises many of the duo’s favorite color-washed concrete garden pieces, which have brought them steady success through 18 years of collaboration.

Included are jewel-toned mirrors, lush leaves, bird baths, and their iconic giant pomegranate sculpture among other pieces. Little’s paintings are on view, as well.

Yet audiences can, as do the artists themselves, re-frame the work. Although it’s classic, it’s also new, reflecting the slower-paced lifestyle that the couple shifted into following the sale of their showpiece Wing Point garden last summer.

The situation couldn’t have fallen into place better, they said. On any given day during one of the regular “garden opens,” a thousand people might troop through the magically landscaped property and all of the attendant sculptures and constructions that lay in wait.

“After 18 years of tending the garden, and hosting tens of thousands of people, literally, it was time for a change,” Lewis said.

That said, they couldn’t just cease; the garden had a soul of its own, so it wouldn’t be right to stop cold turkey.

Happily, an East Coast buyer, a client and old friend who loved their work, stepped forward to buy and maintain the property. It was a dream of his to own the garden, and the purchase left Little and Lewis free to fly… all the way next door.

They’d owned the neighboring home for some time before moving into it, and in some ways it had always represented a future pressure relief valve. Although the one-third acre lot was identical in size to their quasi-public garden, the feeling was entirely different. It was theirs alone.

Once remodeled, the interior became a sanctuary that was surrounded by enough outdoor areas to garden if they chose to, but no space demanding to be designed, built or tended to.

Little and Lewis’s work, as it has been since they partnered in 1991, remains a collaboration. They constructed their first pomegranate in the late 1990s; like most of their sculptures, these pieces begin with a tightly bound wire armature covered with a “skin” of concrete spread by hand and then colored. The technique extends to other spherical figures, such as a recently commissioned blue-green globe fountain, as well as to more delicate looking constructions such as a massive, elaborately curled and veined leaf-shaped fountain.

Little jokes that nowadays, except for the painting that is his own domain, Lewis does all the work while he samples the chocolates

“Hey, I’m 65. I get the better portion of chocolate,” he said.

A self-taught artist since grade school in Texas, Little’s paintings have a Greco-Roman flavor that mirrors the finishes used in the garden sculptures. This chalky, jeweled patina in turn reflects Lewis’s background as an archeological illustrator in Greece.

“I think the work has been an expression of both of our personalities. In a way, it’s like our children,” Little said.

As to the aesthetic questions surrounding how art and nature blend, Little and Lewis have literally written the book: the 2005 hardcover “Garden Gallery: The Plants, Art, and Hardscape of Little and Lewis.” It, and their old garden, offered a lush exploration of the notion that art and nature can seamlessly mix to create an otherworldly, transportive playground.

People would tell them, in fact, that their garden felt mysterious, with its faces and strange objects hidden under leaves. As the observer walked the property, he in turn was “observed” by something that looked alive but in fact was art.

“For a moment, it blurs the boundary between who we are and what we see. And that’s where the mystery comes in,” Little said.

This month’s show came about when they ran into BAC Exhibitions Director David Sessions at the market; as Little notes, “a lot of business gets done at the grocery store.”

Following that, the partners are working toward a point where they can spend more time in Mexico, where they have a home that is done, but a garden that isn’t. So they’re getting their brains around the new challenges surrounding high-altitude gardening in small, courtyard spaces.

Meanwhile, Little is unable to keep from designing small corners of the current Wing Point property. They’ll also continue to make art, and be thankful that in what Lewis terms a “very dark period” for artists, they’re able to earn a living doing what they love.

“We will continue to have to be artists for the rest of our lives,” Lewis said. “And that’s OK.”

“As long as there’s chocolate involved,” Little added.