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Show Looney takes physical approach . '. ...... ' 5 " f i . . i : i ....... ... e v ' J'f c:v .nf 'V.-:; , I. . "'' - v-r,r;-riJ-1-,.. Y '., , . . f , ' k ' . - . ' ' .1 . ?', t0 . - - j ' " -v. -A-V vi- - i , ' 1.1 " ' ' V ! - f 1 ; I ' v ' ' ' ' -. -, . Hj'r V- i i . "l --v T' A , 4 , "-' i " ; -X ' I . - Vi... ....... c - - - by Rick Brough What happens when an ex-football player turns to art? You get a painter who applies a real hands-on style to his work, Dan Looney of Boise, Idaho admitted. "I'm aggressive. I will literally rub the paint into the canvas with my hand." You can find further evidence evi-dence of his style by visiting the Looney exhibit in the lower gallery of the Kimball Art Gallery. In a tree scene, the strokes of white are not color. They are places where Looney has scraped away at the pale canvas with his fingernail, a knife or a blade. Even if you didn't know . how Looney puts his work together, the results betray an aggressiveness. His landscapes, land-scapes, collages and European Euro-pean scenes often show swift torrents of brush strokes, thick rivulets of paint and furious, bright potpourris of color. About his versatility he simply said, "I like to have something different going all the time." ' ' His current interest, collages, col-lages, he has pursued for the last 15 months. He starts, he said, with paintings done in watercolor. Then he tears them up, saving the most interesting pieces, and pasting past-ing them on a masonite base. He fills the rest in with acrylic. The word "collage" usually usual-ly reminds you of abstract collisions of material. But Looney produces recognizable recogniz-able scenes of nature. He indulges his enthusiasm for trees, he said, living along ' . the Boise River. His fluid nature artwork is a contrast, he pointed out, to the stiff look of man-made structures in his paintings. It helps for buildings to age. "Some structures over time look more like part of nature," he said. A final subgroup in his exhibit seven European watercolors comes from a recent trip to England, Italy, Greece, and Belgium. In topic and medium, the work has a vigorous variety. One area he's not interested in now, Looney said, is oils on paper and pastels. "Most times I am fairly successful in a direction I pursue. When it's not, I paint it over with white and start again not to say I might not go back to the first idea." Looney is eclectic, but also successful. Of the 80 paintings paint-ings he produced from the European trip, 73 were sold or pre-commissioned. The trip gave him a chance to look up his artistic influences in-fluences Jean-Baptiste Co-rot, Co-rot, the English seascap-ist seascap-ist Turner, and the pre-Impressionist pre-Impressionist French painters. He talked with an appalled fascination about the stiff religious paintings he saw dating from the Middle Ages. They were born from contrived motives, mo-tives, he recalled. "The rich families who commissioned them thought they were buying their way into heav-en. heav-en. For the future, he wants to travel to the Orient to sample the art work there. And more immediately, "I hope to live in the Greek Islands, paint, and built boats for five years." Looney doesn't rest at one artistic point very long, ("I get very bored very easily," he said). But there is a common strain through his work. "In it all I have an interest in experimental presentation. pre-sentation. And I want it to have a message for somebody." some-body." The Looney exhibit plays at Kimball Art Center through July 20. . .- . photo by Jill Snyder "The Old Mill," a watercolor by Dan Looney. |