Whether they're painting, designing wood boxes, conducting phone interviews or raising their kids, Cheryl Agulnick and Ken Hochberg insist on having some order.

Hochberg repeatedly turned down phone interviews before consenting on the third attempt. His reason for doing so wasn't any particular disdain for the media. He just refused to talk about the boxes he and his wife, Agulnick, collaborated on without her being present.

Then, when Agulnick arrived at home and Hochberg was OK with doing an interview, the couple couldn't speak at the same time, despite Hochberg's insistence earlier in the day that there would be no interview unless they talked together.

Again, the couple wasn't trying to be difficult. It's just that the kids were running around the house, and someone needed to keep tabs on them. So there was no collaboration on answers — an orderly household came first. The reason for the repeated attempts at a interview was a HUB Gallery display of Agulnick's oil paintings and the wood boxes she collaborated on with Hochberg.

Agulnick stressed that while the paintings lack a unifying theme, they all celebrate a sense of rhythm and, not surprisingly, order.

"I'm from Kutztown, Pa., by a large Mennonite population so we know (Mennonites) well," she said. "I've learned about agriculture from them. I appreciate its rhythm — you plant things, tear them down, plant again. You know how a cornfield works. You plant the corn. You work the field, and then you harvest it. Then you've got to sell the corn. After that you plant more corn."

That rhythm is explored in two particular paintings in the HUB Gallery display, which runs through March 18. One painting is a lifelike depiction of cornstalks through a farmhouse window. The other is a painting of the husks of cornstalks, maybe the same ones, after the corn has been harvested. Agulnick said her goal in those and all of her other paintings was to make the art on the canvas appear real. "I paint representationally," she said. "When I paint I try to get things to be real. I'm not just shooting for the surface. It has a presence that's more than what you would expect on the surface."

Among her favorites in the display, Agulnick said, are three works that celebrate the patterns and rhythms of Islamic art. "There's three large paintings of fabric," she said. "They get at something. I have a sort of hobby-slash-passion for Islamic art. It's patterned, almost to an ecstatic state. I tried to get there with these works."

In addition to Agulnick's oil paintings, the HUB Gallery display includes the wood boxes she and Hochberg have worked on together since their marriage eight years ago.

"The thing about them is there's a surprise," Agulnick said. "What's on the inside isn't what you'd expect from the outside. They're completely non-functional. The last one we did is a pyramid box. On the outside you see these things flying around. When you open the door you see these pink, hairy things coming out the top of the pyramid."

While the couple shares the painting duties when it comes to the boxes, Hochberg decides their shape. He said that has little to do with him wanting control — it's just that he handles the carpentry, and he said with a laugh that he's not very good. "I'm a total amateur," Hochberg said. "We had to do six square boxes before I thought, 'Hey, you know, I could probably do a pyramid.' "