Michael Dailey

Entrancing works of Michael Dailey at 2 galleries
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Art review | Entrancing works of Michael Dailey at 2 galleries

Talented Northwest artist Michael Dailey is the subject of worthy exhibitions at Seattle's Greg Kucera Gallery and Francine Seders Gallery.
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MICHAEL DAILEY
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At top, Michael Dailey's "Foggy Green."
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MICHAEL DAILEY

At left, "July Tide."
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Paintings, drawings and mixed-media work by Michael Dailey, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Feb. 14, Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave. S., Seattle (206-624-0770 or www.gregkucera.com); 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and 1-5 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 8, Francine Seders Gallery, 6701 Greenwood Ave. N., Seattle (206-782-0355 or www.sedersgallery.com).

This may seem disrespectful to Michael Dailey, the immensely talented Northwest artist, but frankly, I've never liked the way his paintings look in reproduction, online or in print. The abstract paintings seem too slick, almost schmaltzy, like panes of colored sugar. In our age of virtual realities and reproductions, this could be one reason why Dailey is a bit underappreciated.

In person, his paintings are an entirely different story — a nuanced story that is both intimate and spacious. Since the 1970s, Dailey has imbued his paintings with gradations and contradictions that draw you in for an entrancing visual experience.

The vivid and surprising colors (mint green! salmon pink!) and vibrant light of the canvases are grounded by an unexpected opacity as well as stable compositions and variations in texture and hue.

Dailey has been committed to the possibilities of abstraction for decades, and exhibitions at two local galleries demonstrate how lucky we are to have him here.

At Greg Kucera Gallery, take advantage of the opportunity to contrast the trademark Dailey paintings with some of his earlier works. In the 1960s, Dailey created oil paintings that are rich with impasto, earthy colors and landscape-ish compositions that bring to mind Richard Diebenkorn's early landscape works.
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Like Diebenkorn, Dailey began to empty out the center of his canvases and thin down his paint application. In the 1970s, Dailey switched to acrylics for health reasons and experimented with paint application until he achieved the paradoxical effect of solidity and translucency that is so key to his art.
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While Rothko's works are profound and often somber, Dailey's are both invigorating and soothing.
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While Rothko feathered the edges of his central shapes, creating an ethereal effect, Dailey frames his with geometric lines and structures that show off and anchor the central spaces.
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A prominent Northwest artist and former University of Washington professor, Dailey actually has more in common with the light-filled, California abstract expressionism of Diebenkorn and the color field explorations of Rothko than with the more calligraphic, expressive approach of Northwest Mystics like Mark Tobey and Michael Graves.
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While Kucera (a collector of Dailey's work) presents a chronological range of works, Francine Seders, who has represented Dailey since 1970, is now exhibiting only recent pieces.
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In "Foggy Green," for example, Dailey opens up the structure of the border to give us a peek of swirling brushstrokes. These smaller paintings seem to allow Dailey freedom to play.

Dailey has said that, during his process, the "image changes many times as the painting evolves, and I quite literally don't know where I am going until I get there."
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Art review | Entrancing works of Michael Dailey at 2 galleries

Michael Dailey: Color, Light, Time and Place, Hallie ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem Oregon

Michael Dailey Francine Seders Gallery: MICHAEL DAILEY

MICHAEL DAILEY was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1938. He received BA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa. From 1963 until 1998 he taught painting and drawing in the School of Art at the University of Washington. He is represented by the Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, WA and the Laura Russo Gallery, Portland, OR.

Michael Dailey's work has been widely exhibited in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the United States. Among the public collections in which his work is included are the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, The Seattle Art Museum, The Tacoma Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the University of Washington.

We are greatly saddened by the passing of Michael Dailey. Please click on the following link for his obituary.
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Michael Dailey

It takes two galleries to capture the colorful career of Michael Dailey
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Art review | Entrancing works of Michael Dailey at 2 galleries

Michael Dailey's "Greenhill: Yellow Sky" (2004), acrylic on paper, at Francine Seders Gallery.

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Dailey, 66, seems at first more the modernist, that is, a painter who not only rejects blatant, identifiable imagery, but one who accepts the physical limitations of modernist painting.
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Michael Dailey, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 9, closed Dec. 25, 26 and Jan. 1, Francine Seders Gallery, 6701 Greenwood Ave. N., Seattle (206-782-0355 or www.sedersgallery.com).
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For this show, Dailey has concentrated on smaller acrylics on paper, with just a few 2-by-3-foot canvases and three larger works averaging 3 by 4 feet in size.While still uniformly frail and delicately nuanced, the sequence of 30 works points up the retired University of Washington professor's movement toward greater structure and stricter, marked-off sections of color.

Are the works of this artist really abstract paintings or might the future see them as conventional, late 20th-century landscapes?With titles like "Alaska Landscape," "Beach Landscape," "Northern Meadow" and "Dark Sea," Dailey's submerged realistic intentions are clear.