In William R. Davis’s landscape painting, “Late Day Colors,” the last light of the late sun illuminates the sky and sends a shimmer of light onto a lake: It’s the sun’s final hurrah before disappearing behind a distant forest. In another painting, “Bouquet,” by Daniel Caro, a glorious bunch of sunflowers and yellow roses cheerfully announces itself in a white ceramic vase. Then there’s a sensitively rendered self-portrait by Kristen Valle Yann in a white headscarf; she gazes off the edge of the painting, deep in thought. All three paintings are different from each other, yet they have two things in common: Each is painted directly from life rather than from a photograph, and all are featured in the same exhibition, “The 10th Annual Holiday Small Works Exhibition” at the Collins Galleries, Orleans, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Most of the more than 100 paintings included in the exhibition were painted …