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When he wanted to relax, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would sit down at his easel and paint.

“I believe that he got started at the urging of Winston Churchill,” said David Humphrey, a New York-based artist, curator and writer, and a senior critic at Yale University. “Churchill was definitely a serious painter. He worked in a sort of early modernist idiom and he wrote a book, actually, on painting (‘Painting as a Pastime’). He thought painting would help Ike relax.”

Eisenhower found solace creating still lifes — peaceful, bucolic landscapes that caught Humphrey’s attention when he first saw them on the Internet. He liked them enough to partner with the former Supreme Allied Commander and create works that were part Eisenhower, but mostly Humphrey.

In “Ike’s Bridge,” one of several pieces by Humphrey that started as paintings by Eisenhower, everything is clean and relatively calm. It’s just as Ike would have wanted it, except to the left of a charming covered bridge is an African-American man wearing an Eisenhower mask.

“I’ve always been a hybridizer,” said Humphrey, who is in residence at Lux Art Institute through Dec. 4. “I’ve almost always had a source, sometimes many different sources, that was part of the painting. And the process of making the painting is to absorb them, to harmonize them with other elements, and then to build a picture.”

On display at the Lux, where Humphrey will be painting a large mural during his residency, are paintings inspired by sources ranging from an artist friend (“Nicole,” inspired by Nicole Eisenman) to a record cover by the Carpenters (“Red Car”). Humphrey frequently visits rummage sales and secondhand stores looking for inspiration, and he found the 1973 album “Now and Then” — with its picture of Richard and Karen Carpenter driving past the Carpenters’ family home in Downey in Richard’s red 1973 Ferrari — at a yard sale.

“There’s something so odd about this particular image on the album cover,” Humphrey said. “You can hardly tell who is in the car, but it’s the Carpenters, and it just seems to be an un-self-conscious celebration of the joys of suburbia. And I think their music embodies some of those joys. So I used it as kind of a location, and I thought about that red car as sort of — what would you call it? — maybe a sort of relationship pod?”

In the painting, the car, which almost seems like a space capsule, looks as if it is protecting the pair from the atmosphere outside. They almost appear to be trying to drive out of the picture.

Humphrey acknowledges that his partnerships, this one with the Carpenters, are one-sided, but he does allow his collaborators to have their say. The cultural, historical, social and even musical references they bring to a painting have a transformative quality.

“It’s a way of getting others into the work so the work isn’t just under my overbearing subjectivity,” said Humphrey. “It keeps it oxygenated, it keeps it off-balance, alive in some ways, and hopefully, even anticipates a relationship with spectators.”

He has nothing against art that is less chaotic and is self-contained in its references and more explicit in its meaning, but that’s not the art that appeals to him as a painter or a writer.

“The thing is, you can never really control the meaning of the thing,” he said. “Images have an inherent slipperiness, they have a built-in uncontrollability that I think is part of their life, part of their vitality. So if you seek to control it, it’s a little bit of a white-knuckle absurdity. And I guess I like the idea that a painting can reflect all of the layered qualities of consciousness that has elements of memory, of history, of desire, of a complicated self.”

Finding a context for Humphrey’s art can be challenging, given his range of influences and his apparent aversion to labels. He’s been called a pop surrealist, although that doesn’t really address the unexpected depth and dimension of his work that spans the ’80s to the present.

“I feel that the discourses that thread their way through those times — identity politics, postmodernism, neo-expressionism, neo-surrealism, pop art, neo-pop — all have a role in my work,” he said. “But in some ways, I think I’m an eccentric in regards to all of those movements. I’m kind of independent. And then my work grows out of a strange thread that might begin in symbolism with sort of a spin past Cezanne and cubism, picking up elements of surrealism along the way, before it kind of blossoms out of de Kooning and pop art. That’s my weird genealogy.”

Born in Germany, Humphrey grew up in Pittsburgh, where his first art encounters were in the basement studio of his father, an advertising executive who sculpted for a hobby. He learned just enough to enter the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he completely gave himself over to art.

“In some ways, maybe it was a late-’60s counterculture view that art, somehow, seemed to be a form of resistance to the status quo,” he said. “It had a critical relationship to the dominant culture, to mass culture, and yet, somehow, at the same time, it offered a sustaining of these other deep values,” he said. “That was really interesting to me, that I could exercise a kind of scholarship that suddenly under urgency to make new work, literary history, science, the emerging philosophy of mind, neuroscience and consciousness, had a relevance. I could read and study in a way that would be reflected in my work.”

His eventual graduate work at New York University was more geared to literature than art, and his writing (in a new collection, “Blind Handshake”) is full of literary, art and cultural references, just as his art characteristically includes elements outside the canvas.

“I didn’t have one of these unbridled imaginations in which images and dream material poured out of me,” Humphrey said. “In a way, my art school origins in painting were landscape and still life; it was about observation, looking at something, and somehow seeing that the imagination could emerge out of relationships, something outside of yourself.

“It’s adapting your sensibility, or your way of understanding things, and evolving your practice from that. My work looks kind of eccentric and imaginative, but it’s been cultivated, groomed and constructed.”

Constructed down to the smallest elements. Looking at his paintings at the Lux, only “Ike’s Bridge” has a signature, which in its size and style looks over-the-top and playful. But there’s more to it than that.

“It’s a private joke,” Humphrey said. “It’s exactly the scale and position that Eisenhower signed his paintings, so I used his font, and his size, to substitute my own name.”

Perhaps Eisenhower would have appreciated that kind of attention to detail. Certainly Churchill would have approved. To quote the British Bulldog: “Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting.”