Review

"Mr. Lucky," Oil and Acrylic on Canvas.

James Brinsfield
Sky Way

9 a.m.-5 p.m.

The Dolphin Gallery
1600 Liberty
Kansas City, MO
816.842.4415

Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, Noon-5 p.m. Saturday
Runs through: May 8

Gallery site: http://www.thedolphingallery.com

The mysterious "They" say that first impressions are everything.

The mysterious "They" are only half right ... meaning wrong.

Granted, the first impression given by the paintings in James Brinsfield's solo show Sky Way runs along the lines of Man, there's a lot happening here, and it's going in a lot of different directions.

And there is: black swoops and swirls swerving and meandering this way and that, bright half-tablet shapes and small dark rectangles popping up everywhere, sweeps and washes of color as both central and supporting elements.

But in every case, the pieces in Sky Way (which runs through May 8 at Dolphin Gallery in the West Bottoms, along with Jim Leedy's Cosmos and work by Nate Fors, Judith Sanazaro, and Aaron Storck) are cohesive wholes and not merely the sum of their parts.

Take Mr. Lucky, today's featured work.

It's loaded, almost overwhelmingly so, with first-impression power. But a return look reveals subtleties — the fact, for example, that the rounded colored shapes aren't solid, but networked with white space — and a theme of arcing paths that return near, but not exactly to, their points of origin.

Brinsfield writes of his work as being a postmodern examination of the post-World War II era, a time of optimism and prosperity, construction and conformity: the hope of what life was about to become, he writes, balanced with our present sense of the decline of the American Dream.

That era ended long ago ... but in keeping with that theme of arc and return, Brinsfield's show could have been created for our time of rampant unemployment, massive debt and uncertainty about the future.

Because, despite all of those things, there remains a persistent hope of ... well, to paraphrase the artist, what life could be about to become.

And just as history and current events alike both bear ongoing examinations, to dig beneath the surface to what really is, so Sky Way bears repeated viewings beyond its strong first impression.

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