"Abracadabra", Acrylic on Canvas.
William Rainey
Magic Show
10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Blue Gallery
118 Southwest Boulevard
Kansas City, MO
816.527.0823
Hours: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.
Runs through: Dec. 1.
Gallery site: http://www.bluegalleryonline.com
For generations, people have watched magicians perform amazing illusions and wondered, How in the world do they do that?
In today’s tattletale snitch information society, where no secret is absolutely safe and few are even moderately so, one doesn’t have to wonder: There’s a television show dedicated solely to exposing the techniques behind famous feats of vanishing, metamorphosis and grisly death defied.
One common thread runs through each illusion: Every step, even the seemingly insignificant, is carefully laid out and choreographed. Split-second timing ensures that audiences see only what the magician wants them to see … and it all looks seamless.
It’s kind of funny, then, that William Rainey gave his solo exhibition at Blue Gallery the title Magic Show.
Rainey’s acrylic-on-canvas art is anything but seamless. It’s a riot of color and shape, juxtaposition and interposition, line and squiggle and occasional image. The eye doesn’t know where to start, and a viewer can find his or her gaze pinballing all around the canvas with no stopping point in sight.
So much for establishing control … and that’s fine by Rainey.
I require nothing special of the observer, he writes. Each viewer may see and feel what they see and feel, and play their own themes and improvisations. That way we can both be surprised.
The idea of theme and improvisation is a key component of jazz — which is Rainey’s soundtrack of choice when he’s creating.
Jazz is an improvisation on a theme, a blend of elements in the space of time. My art is like that, Rainey writes. My paintings always begin with drawing nonobjective shapes, the use of line to define area and to push the limits of real and abstract. I can’t imagine painting something exactly as it is. That’s what a camera is for. For me, color and my own emotions play the themes, blending the elements in the space of the canvas.
There are recognizable shapes in a number of the paintings: a partial list would include several gloves and a slice of watermelon in Hocus Pocus, a butterfly’s wing in Metamorphosis, a royal crown in Abracadabra (today’s featured post). They are less representations, though, than additional bits of shape and color in the larger abstract.
If there’s any trickery going on here, it’s an elusive illusion. There is a kind of magic, though, that happens when an artist pulls together so many variable elements into one cohesive theme.
That’s what Rainey has done here — not with smoke and mirrors and false bottoms, but with skill and spark and vision.
