Falling in love with intimacy of painting

Maybe it's the lingering mood of Valentine's Day, or maybe it's my encounters with a bunch of works of art that exude a love of painting, but I'm feeling all sentimental about paint right now.

Ken Kelly, a Seattle-based artist well-known for his labor-intensive, often stenciled paintings that barely contain a multiplicity of layers and polymorphic forms, has parted ways with that work. At Howard House, Kelly's new pictures are stripped down and stimulating and suggest that he, too, has fallen in love with painting again. At first glance, his large rectangular paintings and his smaller, square canvases aren't overly romantic or lush — there's no gooey brushwork or directly poetic shapes or narratives. In fact, they are quite geometric — small rectangles and squares placed all over the surfaces.

But his pared-down shapes and color palette (black, white, red and ... pink!) have allowed him to deeply engage with the process of painting. This intimate involvement carries through to the viewer; we sense his step-by-step, intuitive decision-making as we notice the slightly brushy edges of every rectangle and the slightly imperfect alignment of areas of patterns. Sometimes the little matte rectangles seem to vibrate against the slick, enameled surfaces.

The paintings also draw us in through simple, delightful color contrasts and the possibilities of metaphor suggested by the patterns. They call to mind textiles or circuit boards, skyscrapers at night or bandannas. But I also kept thinking of one particular work by Piet Mondrian, who left Europe for New York City during WWII. "Broadway Boogie Woogie" was a new direction for Mondrian, allowing him to express his excitement about the energy — and jazz music — of New York. In a similar way, Kelly uses the most basic of forms to create utterly controlled, but dynamic rhythms, forging a strong, exciting new direction for his work.

Go to "The Prom"

At Lawrimore Project, "The Prom" is almost ending. Curated by gallery manager Alex Ohge, this gathering of "semiformal paintings" is well worth getting out to see (and dress up in your finest fleece — it's cold in there!). The title plays on the concept of "formalism" — a term that describes paying attention to the forms and processes of art rather than using those forms to present a narrative or overtly meaningful subject matter. But the addition of "semi" to the title makes a big difference and signals the show's playful exploration of what painting can be.

It's clear from the quality and complexity of these paintings that the artists — Gordon Terry, Eric Sall and Tiffany Calvert from New York; Tomory Dodge and Ingrid Calame from Los Angeles; Yoon Lee of San Francisco; and Nicholas Nyland, Robert Hardgrave and Joseph Park from Seattle — take the physical act of making art very seriously. But we're not seeing strict formalism here. Alongside and within the visible marks of painterly process, there are allusions, recognizable subjects, and even humor and history.

Terry's works look like a slick, contemporary take on classic Abstract Expressionism. Terry adds a twist by presenting his splatters, drips and poured areas on acrylic panels (acrylic on acrylic, get it?). This first level of response is kind of satisfying, although limited in possibilities.

But, wait: Terry's actual methods poke more holes in the once-overly-inflated concept of the mark as a direct expression of an artist's process and interior self. His immediate, spontaneous marks aren't, in fact, created on the acrylic surface at all, and they often aren't the direct result of the artist's hand. The paint is poured onto a glass table that Terry tilts in all directions using hydraulic jacks. He'll further manipulate the paint by blowing pressurized air and by other more or less mechanical means. The paint elements are then transferred to acrylic panels where they ooze and float across the surface as perfect impersonators of automatic expression.

Terry's approach is just one example of how each artist in the show flirts with, or hacks away at, the ideas of process, pure abstraction or formalism. But individual works are also compelling in other ways. Hardgrave's large-scale "Colophon" has been considerately placed in the small, theaterlike gallery of Lawrimore Project, allowing us to sit back and let the painting's surreal, psychedelic drama unfold. Calvert's paintings are dreamy jumbles of spatial contradictions and veiled historical references to disparate events and ideologies of American history. These multifaceted ways of experiencing the individual works makes "The Prom" a fulfilling rendezvous.