Review

"Symphony in the Sky 3", Oil on Canvas.

Allen Chow
Leopold Gallery Group Show

10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Leopold Gallery
324 W. 63rd Street
Kansas City, MO
816.333.3111

Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday

Artist's site: http://www.allanchow.com
Gallery site: http://www.leopoldgallery.com

ARTKC365 has featured a number of pieces from corporate collections curated by Leopold Gallery owner Paul Dorrell. It's past time to recommend a show in Dorrell's own Brookside space, don't you think?

Allan Chow's work is a fixture at Leopold Gallery and at Manhattan's Strecker-Nelson Gallery, and collectors large and small have snapped up his paintings. It's not hard to see why. His thick, lively landscapes, executed in oil with palette knives -- in colors, Chow says, found only in dreams -- grab the eye and tempt the fingertips with their deep swirls and ridges.

You know what parents say, though: Look with your eyes, not with your hands.

Even foregoing the tactile, there's plenty to hold a viewer's attention in each of Chow's paintings. Today's featured piece, for example -- Symphony in the Sky 3 -- draws the eye along several lines: on the horizon, in the clouds and in the knifestrokes themselves. The added texture inherent in knife work breathes even more life into the painting, making it more ... well, lifelike ... even as Chow firmly stakes a claim in Impressionist territory.

Chow is a native of Singapore who came to the Midwest to study at the Kansas City Art Institute. He drew on images of the Flint Hills and the area around San Francisco for the Leopold's group show, which also features Derrick Breidenthal, Brian Firkins, E. Spencer Schubert, Brian Slawson and Robert O. Wright.

(Regular readers here won't be surprised to see which region was chosen to be featured today. As noted earlier this week, your humble guide loves him some Eastern Kansas panoramas.)

Whichever you favor -- and you don't have to choose -- give yourself time to fully appreciate Chow's vision and technique.

Eyes only, though, please.

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