Put Steven Trefonides in a room full of his own pictures, and you can feel it: They start to talk to him, and he starts to hear them. The 82-year-old artist, who has lived and worked in Boston for over 50 years, takes on the manner of a diviner, picking up vibrations, subterranean whispers.

He's telling you, the interloper, about each picture; but after a while you start to feel redundant. His manner is concentrated, alert, and improvisational, exactly like an interpreter's.

Gesturing at a vague shape in one painting he'll say, "That's a snake. No, an elephant. An alligator" - without any fear of inconsistency. Of a drawing he made in the '60s, with various figures, a mysterious lake, and a colored rainbow, he says: "It's that feeling you get when you say goodbye - or hello - after a long time. You get an ache in your stomach: Am I here or not here? It's a feeling picture.

"I do a lot of pictures based on feelings," he adds.

Fortunately - or unfortunately - it's rather easy to put Trefonides in a room full of his own pictures: His beautiful Brookline Village home, which he shares with his wife, Phyllis, is filled with them. A downstairs studio and an upstairs attic are crammed with canvases of all shapes and sizes; drawers in the hallway are piled with works on paper.

Trefonides, it turns out, does not have a dealer. Asked why, he says, without bitterness: "No one's asked me. Almost every gallery I was interested in wasn't interested in me."

The situation seems strange, not only because of the quality of Trefonides's work, but because he has been a well-known and popular figure on the Boston art scene for decades. He had a studio on the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth streets, above Joseph's restaurant (now Joe's American Bar and Grill), for 26 years. He had a retrospective at the Fitchburg Art Museum in 1958 and one at the Fuller Art Museum (now the Fuller Craft) in 1968. He also won the St. Botolph Club's artist of the year award in 1980. But that was all a long time ago.

"He has people who are loyal," says his friend Ben Watkins, a photographer and former director of the Society of Arts and Crafts. "He's very generous. He's also a very resourceful and avid seller."

Now somewhat frail, Trefonides has warm dark eyes that convey a hint of mischief. Not exactly reticent, he's nonetheless economical in what he has to say, and he has a tendency to toss in subversive or self-deprecating comments with a poker face.