Review

Untitled, Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper.

Richard Van Cleave
Retro

1-5 p.m.
(Special Reception)

Pi Art Gallery
419 E. 18th St.
Kansas City, MO
816.210.6534

Regular Hours: 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday; other days by appointment.
Runs through: Jan. 31

Gallery Site: http://www.piartgallery.com

We begin with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein (which, as is the case with many such quotes, might be apocryphal):

Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else has ever thought.

It's a good quote, no matter who said it first. And it's especially appropriate for today's featured artist, Richard Van Cleave.

Van Cleave, whose show Retro opened Friday night at Pi Art Gallery, turned the seemingly random side effects of his family's printing business into a significant portion of his body of work (including the untitled watercolor-and-acrylic painting at the top of this post).

Where others might have seen nothing more than an assortment of cut marks, Van Cleave saw connections: concrete shapes, perhaps, or the frameworks upon which to hang abstract explorations. As a result, things that might have been discarded were reborn as art. Some, like the painting above, are purely visual in their impact. Others amuse (in the good way) ... or, in the case of one particularly post-apocalyptic work, haunt (also in the good way).

Van Cleave takes the "happy accident" ethic several stages further in a series of monochrome ink-on-paper prints, reminiscent of Asian paintings, which hang on the west wall near the Art-O-Mat.

He tells the story far better than I could, and I'm loath to provide spoilers, so you should go to today's "second reception" and hear it from him in person. This afternoon's highs are supposed to be in the 20s, which is positively balmy compared with last week's bitter cold snap.

(Kemper East is closed today, or I'd suggest a double dose of Van Cleave's creativity for the afternoon. He has work in Inside Out, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art's staff show, which runs through June 19; hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday.)

Not everything in Retro, which spans his 30-year creative career, had such serendipitous starts. His newest works, a pair of floral paintings, stemmed (pardon the pun)  from a project to photograph every flowering plant in his garden. But rather than go for bright realism, he's choosing to explore the challenges and rewards of the limited palette.

"Working with a lot of color is too easy," he says. "Put some red next to some yellow, and you've got instant color contrast. This is more of a challenge."

The Einstein quote might need a bit of tweaking. Creativity isn't merely in leaping to a new thought. It's in doing what Van Cleave has done for the past three decades: landing on that new mental territory, claiming and colonizing it ... and going to work to make it productive.

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