No one paints like this anymore. Susan Homer's pretty — dare we say earnest? — still lifes make us imagine the artist merrily painting away in a sunlit room, or out in a blossom-drenched field, for hours on end. We've seen so much world-weary art recently that our first impulse was to reject Homer's work as something our grandmother would hang on her wall. But then, after a while, we realized that Homer's paintings — showing at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn through April 27 — are actually lovely: bright and happy, featuring tiny birds with big personalities. Maybe Grandma knew what she was doing. —Emma Pearse