No Apologies -- Michael Dailey's Paintings Are More Beautiful Than Fashionable

------------------------------------------- Visual arts preview

"Michael Dailey, New Paintings," through Jan. 4 at Francine Seders Gallery, 6701 Greenwood Ave. N., Seattle; 206-782-0355. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. -------------------------------------------

At a time when making beautiful paintings seems completely out of style, Seattle painter Michael Dailey is an iconoclast.

For more than three decades the Seattle artist has been creating what he calls abstractions based on landscapes. They might just as easily be described as expertly painted, lusciously colored compositions that while hardly realistic nevertheless evoke landscapes and seascapes in the same dreamy, subconscious way that certain smells recall long-ago memories or a bit of damask can trigger a reverie of longing.

And he's not the least bit apologetic about it. "I do my thing and the rest of the world is kind of out there," said Dailey, 59, who also is a long-time University of Washington art professor. Asked about the contemporary art world's appetite for sculpture, mixed media, video, installation art, photography - virtually everything except painting, Dailey shrugs politely.

"My way of coping is basically to ignore all that," he said. "I'm a painter, and painting is very solitary, private work. I tell my students that you've got to realize you're doing something selfish. If you can touch someone else, that's wonderful. But your work has to come out of its own ethos."

Making art that's fashionable clearly isn't one of Dailey's big concerns. But as his new show at Francine Seders Gallery demonstrates, gorgeous painting transcends fashion. In his 12th show at the gallery since 1966, Dailey is showing a group of paintings with names such as "Orange Sunset Landscape" and "Night Beach #3," and colors that seem to come from nature's most sublime palette.

In "Night Beach #3," 1997, lines and color bars frame the composition on three sides. Inside these compositional boundaries, a dusky wave of color moves from purple/rose at the bottom to the deep blue of a summer sky at twilight near the top. Where the colors change is impossible to point to precisely. One of Dailey's signatures is his ability to move from one tone to another seamlessly, leaving no marks, not even brush strokes, as tell-tale clues. As the name of the painting suggests, "Night Beach #3" looks like the afterglow of a particularly glorious beach sunset.

Dailey says the paintings are rarely about specific places. "I'm fascinated by paradoxes. I'm not using recognizable images. I want my work to be gauzy, about the transcendent world, metaphorical."

A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Dailey earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in art at the University of Iowa, studying Chinese painting as a graduate student. It was the '60s, a time when some young artists were turning away from American and Western European notions about art. Dailey found himself pulled to traditional Chinese ideas about art being evocative, many-layered, nonspecific. He also liked the way traditional Chinese paintings look both flat and very deep, a telescopic technique he uses in his own work.

"The old saying about Chinese painting is, to do a painting, you take a journey of 1,000 miles, come home, bring home the memory and then make a painting that should be the composite of that memory," he said. "It's the idea of distillation. My study of Chinese painting molded me profoundly. It was so different from the Western idea of going out in the world and transforming it through art, which is very mechanistic."

With his interest in Asian art and philosophy, it was serendipitous that Dailey was hired as an art professor at the University of Washington in 1963. Though it had been two decades since Morris Graves, Mark Tobey and their circle had been hailed on the national art scene as the "Northwest Mystics," Dailey's artistic homage to Chinese art made him, by accident, something of a young practitioner of the Northwest mystic spirit. His paintings certainly didn't, and still do not, resemble work by Graves, Tobey or others. But Dailey shared their attraction to Asian art and their interest in abstracted, transcendent compositions.

It's impossible not to think of the work of the late California artist Richard Diebenkorn when looking at Dailey's big fields of color and barely-shaped landscapes. Like Diebenkorn, Dailey is a skilled colorist who never lets color become the only focus of his work. Though he paints on canvas with acrylic paint, a medium that many artists dislike because it cannot be manipulated as easily as oil paint, Dailey achieves an oil-paint-like depth with his acrylics. He switched to acrylics in the late '70s when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Because of the toxins associated with oil paint, some artists switch to acrylics for health reasons.

A friendly, modest guy who seemed surprised that anyone would want to interview him, Dailey says being good with color "isn't really a skill; you just keep painting until something works. I never have been able to go to what I want. I'll work on something over and over. "